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The former chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, believes the internet is set to “split in two” within ten years, with a US-led version and another led by China.
Mr Schmidt, who is worth around $10 billion, claims that the Chinese government's censorship of online content will lead to the emergence of an entirely new internet that is incompatible with the western version of the web.
"I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America,” said Mr Schmidt, talking at an event in San Francisco on Thursday.
“If you look at China... the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number.”
The comments come as Google, his former company, has been criticised for an alleged effort to launch a new censored version of the search engine. In order to comply with Beijing's rules, the search engine being developed by Google for China reportedly links users’ personal mobile phone numbers to the search terms they type in. The feature would enable Chinese security services to link searches with individuals, raising the risk they could be identified if they sought information Beijing viewed as politically sensitive.
This process of bifurcation of the Internet may have already started with the development of China's "Great Firewall", a tool used by the People’s Republic of China to censor and police material on the internet.
The firewall has seen several different versions and has grown increasingly sophisticated and powerful with the help of artificial intelligence. China currently blocks access to western sites such as Yahoo, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia.
The country, which now has the world’s biggest internet population with an estimated 772m users, has its own version of these sites. To access and search for information on the web, citizens mostly use Baidu, China’s own version of Google. Weibo fills the gap left by Facebook and Twitter and instead of YouTube, users log on to Youku Tudou.
Mr Schmidt's comments came after he was asked whether the internet would gradually fragment. Mr Schmidt explained that the online split could form because of “fantastic leadership in products and services” seen in China, leading neighbouring countries to adopt Beijing's infrastructure.
He explained that Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, a plan by China’s government to grow its global political and economic influence by building up trade in Asia and Africa, will accelerate the creation of a China-led internet.
“Look at the way BRI works, their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries – it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom,” he said.
Google shut down its core service in China in 2010 after years of operating a censored search engine in the country. The local version of its search engine for users in mainland China, which was launched in 2006, filtered out results which the Chinese government didn’t approve of.
But the new plan to reenter China is facing a powerful backlash. Last month, hundreds of Google employees wrote to the company to protest saying that the initiative raised "urgent moral and ethical questions".
