Dubai: Google CEO Eric Schmidt Wednesday said that the internet giant is seeing its fastest growth, both in terms of revenue and users, in the Mena region. He declined to give specific numbers, however.
The company's other strong growth area was Latin America.
Schmidt, who is attending the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, generally refused to talk about a number of other issues involving the company, such as the ongoing negotiations with China over that country's internet censorship policy and complaints from the European Union regarding anti-competitive practices.
He would only say Google was in active negotiations with China.
Schmidt said he was supportive of changes in US foreign policy that might allow Google to operate in Iran, but currently the company was banned by US law from operating there.
‘Liberalise society'
"It's consistent with our moral view that access to more information creates an opportunity for people to have more democracy," he said, adding, "The best way to liberalise a society is to get people communicating."
However, when asked about the ability of technology to help individuals gain more freedom, he did say that "tanks trump the internet."
Schmidt also addressed issues regarding complaints that Google was taking away advertising revenue from print media. He said he expects that the solutions to the advertising controversy would be the development of subscription services.
"We and others will build subscription services, which people like these news services will offer … to the end users and then the market will determine whether the revenue will come in." Schmidt would not give any financial expectation regarding that type of partnership.
Google has been at the centre of a number of issues related to privacy, especially around the recent release of the Buzz social network. He said people mistakenly believe that the company gave out people's contact lists and email addresses without their permission.
"In the case of Buzz, we did not communicate what Buzz is correctly. We made a mistake," he said. "Many people … believe we without people's permission gave up contact lists, email addresses. We moved very, very quickly to address our mistake … within about four days, to put that fire out."
Schmidt said that the Buzz experience was a good reminder of how Google needs to carefully communicate its respect for people's personal data.
"It's always on people's minds," he said. "It makes sense to me that people would have that concern and we need to re-double our efforts."
Schmidt said there is a shortage of Arabic content, and that Arabic websites were slow to be developed.
