Google's Eric Schmidt: "Public Choice Scholar"

Mercatus Center senior fellow Jerry Brito provides some highlights of the recent Washington Post interview with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, as he reflected on his first time testifying before Congress in an antitrust hearing about Google.  Here are some excerpts:

"So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. Okay? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer. I mean, it’s fine. It’s their job. But it’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to…lower than free? You see what I’m saying?"

"One of the consequences of regulation is regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow—which by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it’s a path for the current outcome."

"We want the government to understand if you want to manage something, manage the outcome you want. Don’t specify the technology. Right? In other words, regulate this thing but don’t tell us how to make it technologically. Because if you do, you’ve locked in an incumbent, a specific technological view, et cetera."

"I’m sitting at this dinner in 1995—Andy Grove was the CEO of Intel—and he gives this speech, and he says, “This is easy to understand. High tech runs three-times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three-times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.”  All of my experiences are consistent with Andy Grove’s observation."