Google CEO Eric Schmidt dropped by the Washington Ideas Forum last week. It was clear from his comments that he and his company remain deeply attached to the search giant's self-image not only as a force for good, but as a bastion of innocence, peering into the political system from the outside.

"We've heard a fair amount at this conference over the last couple of days about what Washington doesn't get about what's going on in the country and what's going on in the world," began Atlantic editor James Bennet in an on-stage Q&A interview with Schmidt. "What do you think that Washington doesn't understand?"

"I would invert the question," Schmidt replied. "I would say the average American doesn't realize how much the laws are written by lobbyists."

A fair amount of time

It's "shocking," Google's CEO continued, "now having spent a fair amount of time inside the system, how the system actually works. And it's obvious that if the system is organized around incumbencies writing the laws, the incumbencies will benefit from the laws that are written."

Schmidt obviously liked the word "shocking," so he used it again. "It's shocking to me to see how hard it is to take on any incumbency," he explained.

"But Google is obviously one of the greatest incumbent corporations in America," Bennett noted.

"Perhaps, but we don't write the laws," insisted Schmidt, who sits on the Presidents Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.

"But you do have your own lobbying operation," Bennett patiently replied.

"Yes, one of thousands," Schmidt shot back with raised voice, as if this observation somehow made Google less a lobbyist than the others. The company has spent over $10 million on trying to influence Congress since 2007.

Community governance

Listening to Google's best-known public figure, you would not know that the company has allied itself with an "incumbency" par excellance, Verizon Communications, and the two entities have proposed a set of net neutrality rules that would make any law-writing Capitol Hill lobbyist cheer.

Indeed, the proposal was composed by two registered lobbyists, Verizon's Tom Tauke and Google's Alan Davidson. To wit:

The [Federal Communications Commission] would enforce the consumer protection and nondiscrimination requirements through case-by-case adjudication, but would have no rulemaking authority with respect to those provisions. Parties would be encouraged to use non-governmental dispute resolution processes established by independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiatives, and the FCC would be directed to give appropriate deference to decisions or advisory opinions of such groups [italics added].

Does Google seriously imagine that this "community governance" system would not be dominated by the Android maker's new business partner Verizon and its fellow ISPs? And yet the corporation would deny the government even the authority to make formal rules independent of the "incumbencies" that Schmidt finds so disturbing.

But you've got to hand it to the company. Only second to Google's huge success as an online provider of applications and content is its ability to present itself as the Silicon Valley equivalent of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—the voice of digital Main Street talking common sense and virtue to the Beltway.

Bennet did a good job interviewing Schmidt, but it's hard to imagine him or anyone else asking the same kind of questions of Oracle or Comcast. "How would you restructure the system?" the Atlantic's editor continued. "What would you do to change that?"

Fundamentally disruptive

"One of the things about technology is that technology is fundamentally disruptive," Schmidt explained, "and my experience now, and I've done this for a long time, is that people are always shocked at how real disruption occurs and how much change can occur through empowerment."

Furthermore:

We're at a point now in technology where we really can change the entire political discourse if we want to. Typical example would be that everybody here has a mobile phone. In fact, you have more than one. The fact of the matter is that in Washington, and I've been part of this for years, people write lots of reports about things. But they never test them. But with the mobile phone you could just ask. You could measure everything. And you might be surprised at to what people actually do versus what they say they do—one of the first rules of the Internet. So it seems to me that you could completely change the way that government works and the way the discussion works.

What exactly was Schmidt proposing here? Posting reports on the Internet and asking for comments (which we do at Ars every day)? Posting public opinion polls and contrasting the results with the opinions of various public interest groups?

"Another example would be there are large numbers of very well meaning groups," Schmidt explained, "that do analysis, that produce lots of reports that people don't actually read. But we can measure whether they're read and you should use that as a scoring algorithm for whether you should listen to them or not."

One could come away from this last comment with the impression that Google's CEO equates worthy ideas with how much public exposure they receive. Schmidt evidently feared this might be the case, and added this codicil.

"You could ultimately decide that people don't read anything important, or you could try to figure out what is important that they're actually reading," he continued.

Putting aside how much thought was really given to these suggestions, what remains is the central Google message—a vague but appealing notion that putting technology into the hands of more people is "disruptive" to the current (corrupt) political process. This allows Google to position itself not just as a business, but as part of the social solution.

The entire country

Inevitably the subject got to China. "Do you think the American model is slipping behind the Chinese model?" Bennet asked.

"China can best be understood as a large, well-run business," Schmidt admiringly explained. "And China has roughly the following objectives: It wants to maximize its cash flow, becoming the creditor, if you will, the bank of the world. And second it wants to maximize both its internal demand as well as export demand. And the entire country seems to be organized around that principle."

For example, China decided that renewable energy was crucial, he noted. Now the country controls four-fifths of all solar panels.

"Realistically we had that choice five and ten years ago as a country," Schmidt concluded. "Realistically that would never have gotten through our social climate. Nobody in America would get away with saying, 'what we should do is organize a fundamental industrial policy, to dominate this section of this part of an important new industry'."

But that's what China did, "and now those jobs are in China and not here. And by the way, all that technology was invented in America."

At some point in his remarks, Google's boss acknowledged that China was more than just a business ("I appreciate that that's not what they really are," he added in a side comment). But we'll take Schmidt at his word that he thinks the country "can best be understood" as such.

To a degree unique among communications enterprises, Google represents itself and what it does as part of a process of nation building. To some extent, it can pull this off because the company is relatively new; it does not reside in the tainted auto or financial services sectors. And so Google can claim to stand outside outside politics, offering business tools and a philosophy that could guide America back towards redemption.

"In your job, what have you learned about human nature?" Bennett asked as the conversation concluded.

"A lot," Schmidt replied. "The first message about human nature is that human nature is overwhelmingly positive."

"The people that I work with," he added, "are highly interconnected, and they're highly communicative, and they're highly social, just in a way that's different from people in my generation. They are much better prepared to lead the world than we are."