In an article by Stuart Dredge at the Guardian, Google’s Eric Schmidt holds forth on totalitarian regimes trying to control what they cannot stop: the Internet. The opening:

“Dictators are taking a new approach in their responses to use of the internet in popular uprisings, according to Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

‘What’s happened in the last year is the governments have figured out you don’t turn off the internet: you infiltrate it,’ said Schmidt, speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas.

‘The new model for a dictator is to infiltrate and try to manipulate it. You’re seeing this in China, and in many other countries.’

Schmidt was interviewed on-stage alongside Jared Cohen, director of the company’s Google Ideas think tank. The session, moderated by Wired journalist and author Steven Levy, took the pair’s The New Digital Age book as its starting point.

Levy wondered whether their enthusiasm for technology’s potential role in popular uprisings has been dampened in the last year by events in Egypt, the Ukraine and elsewhere.

‘We’re very enthusiastic about the empowerment of mobile phones and connectivity, especially for people who don’t have it,’ said Schmidt. ‘In the book, we actually say that revolutions are going to be easier to start, but harder to finish.

He suggested that governments have realised that simply trying to block internet access for citizens is unlikely to end well – partly because it shows that they’re ‘scared’ – which may encourage more people onto the streets, not less. Hence the infiltration approach.”