China currently has 420 million Internet users, according to Chinese government statistics. But certain sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are blocked. At the same time, China heavily invests into policing the web, using a large organization of regulators that are estimated to number from 30,000 to 50,000, Schmidt said.
Still, the sheer number of Chinese people using the Internet in coming years will push such monitoring past its limits, he added. Currently, the country has more than 800 million mobile phone users, many of whom are starting to use their handsets to go online.
“The question is at what point will there be so many Chinese people online that such mechanisms break down in terms of censorship and so forth?” he said. “If you think about the scale, they’ve got a billion phones that are trying to express themselves. It will be difficult in my view to completely keep up with that.”
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