newsweek | In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the
chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham
Hall, the country house in Norfolk, England where Assange was living
under house arrest.
For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous
insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the
world’s largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the
political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions
engendered by the global network—from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin.
They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the
liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and
statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign
policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to
Western companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war
over the Internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently.
In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.
