Google’s Eric Schmidt: the Internet will be in Chinese

Google’s Eric Schmidt: the Internet will be in Chinese

New York, November 2 (MIA) - Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, ruffled some feathers this past week when he said that five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

How could this be? Well, China’s population is over 1.3 billion, and the country’s Internet penetration is increasing.

There are 338 million Internet users in China, which is larger than the entire official US population, which is estimated at a little over 307 million.

What does this mean? Given the number of Chinese Internet users, there will be an ever increasing amount of Chinese content on the web.

Moreover, the Chinese IDN market will be huge once Chinese Internet users grow accustomed to ICANN’s new IDN friendly stance. The lurking spoiler could be the censorship-happy Chinese government, which could further regulate dot CN names, and the country’s Internet as a whole, at the drop of a hat.