Just for the record.

That speech… this is the only transcript of it anywhere on the internet.

That speech Google chairman Eric Schmidt used to sprinkle internet magic dust over prime minister David Cameron’s election campaign in 2006; that magic Cameron put on as like Elvis Presley or Arthur Daley donning a coat, with a grab of the lapels and roll of the shoulders and a promise that you! yes you! would get some of its magic too! if you just vote for me and my pals Eric and George. Yessirie, you got it coming your way too, aint no mistake.

Steeped in irony – some would say. Seeping with hypocrisy, you might otherwise see it.

Schmidt’s Tory transparency speech invoked human values to tell us what the internet and Cameron were all about: no more of this business where politicians and businessmen hide inconvenient truths so they can tell you one thing while doing another. Here’s our cards on the table and that’s where they’ll stay. Then it disappeared off the net, with Google having not found it convenient for publication, and Cameron’s Conservatives deleting their history because it made an inconvenient fit with their forthcoming election rebranding. Brylcreem all round boys. But ditch the spangly coats.

Schmidt and Cameron didn’t realise till afterwards the internet had a delete button.

Dubbed ‘Politicians and Lie Detectors’…

This is that speech.

<img alt="George Osborne 2006 Conference Speech web promo photo

<George Osborne: … [intro cut off] …

… “Chief executive of Google!”>



<applause>



Thank you very much [sir|George].



<img alt="George Osborne 2006 Conference Speech web promo photo



<Osborne: self-appraising laugh>

<ongoing applause>



Wow.



<applause>



What a… what a wonderful welcome.



<applause>



…what a…



<applause>



…thank you…



<applause>



Ahhm

<applause>

You are too kind, you’re too kind.

That was a wonderful welcome.

Ahhm, ah, I came here because I wanted to talk about how the world is changing, and the role all of us are going to play in all of the things that are about to happen.

I want to talk about basic values – basic human values. The- about freedom of speech. About individual freedom and how individuals will operate in this new world.

And about the, the strength of the free market, and how fundamental that is to the things that all of us, care about.

But even more importantly, the responsibilities of corporations and the individuals that use these amazing new phenomena that is the internet and the companies that are being [sporned] about it.

I want to represent to you first and foremost that I am an inherent optimist about human nature. And that it is that optimism that I think drives a lot of what is going on around you. That optimism is fundamental to how we should view what’s about to happen.

Now the internet as we all know has changed everything.

It’s broken down all sorts of barriers – democratizing access to human knowledge – you can just type a few words into your favourite search engine and know everything.

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

Ahhm. It’s written the rules of production and distribution. The globalization that has so wonderfully occurred involving the United Kingdom in the last 20 years, is directly related to this access to the information, to the role of English as the language, and to the role that Britain in particular has played in all of that.

Now all of a sudden, instead of just dealing with record companies and television companies and so forth, you too can be a producer – of music and of television and of movies and so forth – and get them everywhere. We don’t know if it’s any good or not, but you can do it!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<brief laughter>

And we’ll see whether people will watch what you are doing.

The internet is much more than just a technology, it’s a way of us really organizing our lives. So my position is first and foremost, don’t bet against it.

And I see over and over again, folks – making decisions where they do not reflect, the fact that the internet is all pervasive now in everything that we do. They try to hold information back, rather than recognizing that the inter-the information-the internet is about making information generally available.

Betting against the, the, the net is a bad bet because you are fundamentally betting against human nature.

And human nature wants to communicate. They want to be informed. They want to be, have fun. They want to know what other people are doing.

This has a lot of implications for how we build computers – how underlying technologies are changing – which is a very interesting subject, but for a different kind of an audience.



<murmur>

Rest assured that the technologists and the physicists are building massive super-computers that are behind all of these services that you use. And thesemassive supercomputers carry all of this information in these amazing ways and gets that information to you so quickly. And not just text, but email and voice and video and movies and this sort of thing. We call them clouds. It’s as if all that information is in some cloud out there, and off you can get to it.

Search turns out to be… the unifying principle because there’s too much information and the only way you can keep it organized is to search for it. Interesting conclusion, after all these years.

So search is the inevitable outcome – drives all of these companies, all of these new ways – you can search your emails, you can search your personal files, you can find all that stuff you wrote last year and forgot about it. This happens every day all the time.

Google itself is built around what I call wow moments. All of a sudden you realize the world has changed. For me, it turns out that, I’ve always wanted to climb, Mount Everest. Ahhm, I know this is a shock.

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

And… there’s no scenario where I am going to make it to the top of Mount Everest. But you can take Google Earth. You can start at the bottom and you can climb Mount Everest in the comfort of your office, and go all the way right to the top. And I thought, isn’t technology wonderful – I’ve made it!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter <laughter>

<applause>

The…



<applause>

The-there are more serious stories. Er, we get er, we got a letter when I started my job of the form, ahhm, ‘It does matter that Google is fast.

And, the letter continues.

‘I had these symptoms, and I wrote them into Google, and I pressed the button and it said, “You are having a heart attack dial emergency services!”‘

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

And he did. The ambulance came and said if you had not done that immediately, you’d be dead. So we tell our employees that this is why it’s important Google be fast! People might die.

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter <laughter>

<light applause>

Ahhm. True story.

We get sorts of stories about people who er – and very, very serious stories – about people whose children were abducted – right – Where they found the child in the town next door after many years.

The power of information – and the families were re-unified and all of that – the power of information – is so profound and so liberating, I’ve come to respect it even more than I always have.

So we value, ‘More information means more freedom’. We value the individual responsibility that comes with that – market-making, market driven, not regulated, and very much based on the rule of law.

Go directly to the source! And figure stuff out for yourself. If you’re tired of somebody else telling you what you should think, read it for yourself. Read it and decide. It makes sense. It’s a nice principle. And it puts you in charge.

We run Google in this bizarre way which we call seventy-twenty-ten. Seventy percent of our resources are applied to our core business, 20 per cent on adjacent businesses and 10 per cent on new and innovative things that nobody could possibly have ever thought of, that well up from our creative employees.

I was thinking from this conference, that Mr. Cameron and the leadership could say 70 per cent work on our core activities, 20 per cent work on our adjacent activities and 10 per cent of you are in charge of inventing completely new ideas – half of which are wacko and half of them are brilliant!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter <laughter>

<applause>

Right?



<applause>

So, it…

<applause>

<muted heckling>

This, this model, this model of creativity represented by the incredibly smart people in this room, is a good way to run a company. It may or may not be [chortle] a good way to run a political party! [humble intake of breath]



<isolated laughter>

As people move and as life online today continues, more and more power goes into the hands of end users, and there’s more and more competition. Some interesting statistics, ahm – you probably know what a gigabyte is. A petabyte is a lot bigger and an exabyte is a lot of petabytes. Five exabytes of data, ah, of data, were produced in 2002. If you wanted to watch that on television, our estimate is it would take you forty thousand, seven hundred years.



<murmur>

We have an information explosion in the world that is unparalleled. And with the rise of China and with the rise of India, this will only continue. We have thirty five million blogs doubling every six months. The average blog has exactly one reader – the blogger!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

Okay.



<Applause>

So.



<Applause>

It’s fine. There’s an awful lot of successful blogs and there’s an awful lot that are not!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<isolated laughter>

These paradoxes – the paradoxes of the-of the web, like being lone-lone-lonely in a city – the internet is ah-both a great unifier and a polarizer. The truth emerges much faster on the internet, but falses also emerge more quickly too. More globalization, more tribalism. Mor-the internet makes you mor-mor-more cosmopolitan, but also more hate groups.

These are the paradoxes that you as our political leaders – in the globe – will have to deal with. So, so when we think about it and I’l-I’l-I’ll try and put this in context because you all are are are leaders of-of-of-of a great country.

The role of governments has really got to be thought about now. This is a quote from a US paper: “The internet is in, in, in its relative infancy is like a child exercising new freedom, primarily through challenges to orderly systems – old retailing models, old media, old privacy rights, old libel standards, even old notions of parental control. Some of the pushed – notably governments with statutory power – are going to push back.”

Governments are struggling with what to do with all of this. There are privacy concerns that are very real. The core message that I have for you is that information is power and that we in Google and others are pushing that information into the hands of end users.

Markets that are more efficient – markets with more information – serve everyone. And that we succeed, and I think we all succeed, when speech is the most free and the information is most available.

So in this case, we have to work – we as a company – we need to work with you to make sure that governments do the right thing – that they set the rules of the game, that they operate fairly, that they make sure that people have access, that all of the sorts of things that you could imagine in a good regulatory paradigm for this innovation.

When I think about it – and I’ll put this together and give you a sense of the future – the impact of users of information has just begun.

One of my rules – the first rule that I propose for the internet – is people have a lot to say, and they are going to say it on the internet. Here we have emails, coming up, along the way of our conference.

Experts – you know, we talked about y’all go to college and you university, ah t-to have this tremendous amount of learning that you do. In the future, experts will be – fast learners, fast searchers, because it changes so quickly there will be people who can learn it as quickly as it evolves. The new expert will be someone who knows now something of a lifetime of lear-learning.

What does the world look like? In five years. Or ten. Maybe lets pick five years.

Let me tell you some products that I’d like us to build. Serendipity – I’m typing, this page tells me, what I should have been typing!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

Right.

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

Anybody have this problem?

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

No, that’s wrong, Eric, as usual! This is the correct citation.

We’re build-we’re building and on the way to having simultaneous translations in all languages. Language barriers are a huge barr-a huge issue around peace and prosperity around the world.

Truth prediction… I hesitate to discuss this in a political climate!

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

What probability should we think this statement is truthful? Our computers can make a pretty good guess.

Markets of information and user feedback, and also a political market for political information.

Prediction markets – in the mathematical sense of prediction markets – of information and what will happen.

New modes of search – take a picture on your phone – everybody has their phone, has everybody taken a picture? We’ll figure out who it is, index it and send it to them!

Or not.

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<laughter>

Paper lengthening – another one of my favourites! – please make my paper 10 per cent longer.

<img alt="Conservative Party Conference laughter

<faint laughter>

And you can do it again.

Right? So you lengthen the paper as you submit it to college.



<silence>

Mobile phones everywhere – pioneered here.

Google and an iPod – all of the the world’s information, literally in a device this big – so you always know whether something is true or not.

But I think perhaps the most important thing that will happen…

<img alt="George Osborne 2006 Conference Speech web promo photo

<muted cough>

…is that the internet – and I think this is probably a shared value of everyone in the room – the, the internet can be and I hope will be a revolutionary force in refresh- in repressive societies, driving both literacy and expression to new heights, and to new prosperity.

Ah, it’s, its great to be alive, it’s great to be here – thank you very much for inviting me…



<applause>

…and taking time.



<extended applause>

[self-appraising laughter, to George Osborne] Thank you.

<img alt="George Osborne 2006 Conference Speech web promo photo

<Osborne: Thank you very much! That was a great speech!>



<Osborne: Thank you very much!>

[self-appraising laughter, to George Osborne] That’s wonderful. Thank you!