Eric Schmidt on Google’s Foreign Policy [VIDEO]

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave insight into the company’s burgeoning international policy on Wednesday night at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City. Schmidt, who oversees the company’s technical and business strategy, spoke about the effects of technological democratization in the modern age and some of the challenges Google faces as it drafts its early forays into diplomacy.

Schmidt iterated Google’s position on Iran, the “Great Firewall of China,” and other countries it views as potential threats to modern Western liberalism. Google’s goals, he said, are best served when the company works to serve the interests of a particular country’s citizens, rather than pick fights with that country’s government.

“We’ve tried that. It doesn’t work,” he said dryly.

“It’s always best for us to operate from the standpoint of the citizens in the country rather than Google against the government.”

Last night’s discussion was framed around a paper co-authored by Schmidt entitled "The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power," which was published in this month’s issue of Foreign Affairs.

Schmidt, who is also a member of President Obama’s council of advisers on science and technology, was joined on stage by the paper’s co-author, Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, a current fellow at the CFR and a former policy staffer under Secretaries of State Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Some of the other points touched upon during the meeting were these:

Google’s incorporation of “collaborative filtering” into its search algorithm to incorporate “serendipity” into its search results. Collaborative filtering is a crowdsourcing method whereby the search engine will increasingly rely upon passive feedback from its users, including their search histories, to improve its predictive search results.

The CEO's fears for the digital future: He fears the rogue, empowered crazy person who can use digital democratization for a negative end.

Schmidt’s take on the contentious Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New Yorker, which suggested that the revolutionary effects of social media have been greatly exaggerated in cases like Moldova and Iran.