Expressing his concern over telecommunications malpractice these days of the likes of Apple suing Samsung for patent violation, Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, said that Apple was using patent lawsuits to block Samsung’s market, while denying people the choice to buy the products of the Korean company.
Calling Apple’s case on Samsung ‘unfair, Schmidt, who is in India for his maiden visit, said that it was only recently that telecommunications companies have started using patent lawsuits to counter healthy competition.
“A number of companies, led by the telecommunications industry decided to use patents to stop innovation. A notable example is Apple sued Samsung in a number of courts trying to essentially not allow Samsung’s products into the market,” he said at the Big Tent Summit.
“Now, I understand that there is a dispute over patents but to deny people the actual choice, literally you can’t even choose our product versus another, strikes me as completely unfair and very much not what the patent system was really about,” he added. Apple won a $1.05 billion verdict last August against Samsung.
The legal fight has been widely viewed as a proxy war between Apple and Google. Samsung’s hot-selling Galaxy smartphones and tablets run on Google’s Android operating system.
Talking about India he said:”This place is going to be rocking.”
“In the short term it is China, but math favours India. And I’m a mathematician,” Schmidt said when asked by Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger on his choice on India and China.
Speaking at the question and answer session with Rusbridger, Schmidt expressed great hope for the growth of Internet and broadband users in the country.
He said: “(There are) roughly 600 million mobile phone users in India, there are about 130 million Internet users, (but) there are only about 20 million broadband users. So by any definition India is under-penetrated. And in our book... we talk a lot about the importance of the next 5 billion.
On rumors that Chrome and Android are going to be one giant entity now that Sundar Pichai the head of Chrome is also heading Android, he said “No, we don’t make the decision based on who’s heading the service.”
“There are only 2 billion people on Internet in the world today. And many of those 5 billion would be coming from India. So imagine a situation 5 to 10 years from now. When there is a billion people on the Internet. Will they be significantly different from the first 100 million users. I’m sure there will be many more languages and they won’t be so English focused.”
However, Schmidt added that to achieve this growth India needs to build out the infrastructure and to lower the cost of devices. “I think the sum of all that is that this place is going to be rocking.”