Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on the Digital Disruption
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen discuss their article, "The Digital Disruption," from the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs.
ERIC SCHMIDT is Chair and CEO of Google. He is a Member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and Chair of the New America Foundation. JARED COHEN is Director of Google Ideas. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide.
Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen debate the role that connection technologies will play in statecraft and foreign policy, and how governments and businesses in the West should foster the spread and use of these technologies in places such as China and Iran.
This session was part of the CFR Corporate Program's CEO Speaker series.
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Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.
In the wake of Sunday's contested parliamentary elections, the Russian security services have made obvious and clumsy efforts to shut down independent news sources. But controlling information online will prove impossible, and continued attempts to do so will only backfire.
To date, the Internet economy -- with its emphasis on knowledge and innovation -- has widened the global income gap. Rich nations must help level the playing field in areas from trade to banking to intellectual-property laws. Poor nations, meanwhile, must help themselves by taking steps to promote foreign investment, tackle corruption, and improve education.

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