/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53663000/jpg/_53663792_google.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="People's silhouettes in front of the Google logo"span style="width:304px;"Google has already found itself at odds with some countries, such as China, over censorship/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google's chairman says./p pSpeaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television. /p pHe also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries./p pThe internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring./p pProtesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media./ppMr Schmidt said he believed the "problem" of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to "get worse"./p div style="width:280px;float:right;clear:right;font-size:13px;text-align:right;margin-right:20px;"blockquote style="font-weight:bold;font-size:16px;"p class="first-child"ldquo;In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of televisionrdquo;/p/blockquotespan class="quote-credit"Eric Schmidt/span span class="quote-credit-title"Executive Chairman, Google/span /div p id="story_continues_2""The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television." /p p"If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket," he added./p pGoogle has regularly clashed with China over attempts to limit public access to its internet services./p pMr Schmidt also said he was concerned about the danger faced by employees of the company in parts of the world that deemed material found on its search engine illegal./p pHe said he would not directly name the countries because of the sensitivity of the situation./p pDuring the uprising in Egypt, Google executive Wael Ghonim was detained by Egyptian authorities after taking part in the protests that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak./p pMr Ghonim had been involved in founding an anti-torture Facebook page that helped inspire demonstrations./ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/T3YUC5q3SekShMXlyEHMEZ4equY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/T3YUC5q3SekShMXlyEHMEZ4equY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/T3YUC5q3SekShMXlyEHMEZ4equY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/T3YUC5q3SekShMXlyEHMEZ4equY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/cI_5Qe5z0eM" height="1" width="1"/