WASHINGTON (AFP) — Google chairman Eric Schmidt called on Tuesday for more openness and transparency in government and for it to embrace the power of the Internet.
"Basic information that the government uses is unavailable," Schmidt said in an address hosted by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute which he chairs.
"You still can't fundamentally see the information sources that are used," said Schmidt, a member of president-elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board.
"The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it's not published or because it's on a website which the government has put up which no one can index," he said.
"Government has not embraced generically the tools that we all use every day," said Schmidt, who also serves as chief executive at the California-based Internet search giant.
"It has not embraced blogs, video, all the information sources," he said. "It's time. For example, we can stream almost all the public meetings ... the bandwidth is there."
"It seems to me that you want to encourage debate, the more debate, the more voices lets the truth emerges," Schmidt said.
"It's time to restore trust in how our government works, in how it makes its decisions," he said.
Schmidt, who was addressing the gathering in his Google capacity and not as a member of the Obama transition team, has been mentioned as a possible Chief Technology Officer in an Obama administration but he has said repeatedly that he intends to remain at Google.
Schmidt also said the United States was facing "maybe the toughest economic times we will face in our lifetimes" but he was confident in the future.
"The country has faced many more significant challenges, World War I, World War II," he said.
"I'm convinced that armed with the Internet and sister technologies that we can get our country back to work, we can get really outstanding solutions for the long-term," Schmidt said.
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