Skyrocketing oil prices are hindering global economic growth but they may have beneficial effects for the Internet industry, the vice president of Google Inc. said Wednesday in Seoul.
“Although I’m not happy with increased oil prices, the Internet (industry) may actually benefit from that as people turn to it as an aid to improve their efficiency,” said Vinton Cerf, vice president of the world’s largest online search engine operator, at a press conference.
Cerf is in South Korea to take part in the 2008 OECD Ministerial Meeting.
“We may turn increasingly to video conferencing or other kinds of electronic media in order to avoid having to travel,” the vice president said.
The Google executive also noted that there may be more use of “computational capabilities” for calculating car and aircraft routes to minimize petroleum usage.
“It (high oil prices) may have a positive impact on the Internet,” he said.
Cerf, commonly referred to as one of the “founding fathers of the Internet,” joined Google in 2005 as a vice president, giving advice to senior management on corporate acquisition and investment in new technologies.
When asked about Google’s recent advertisement deal with Yahoo! Inc., Cerf noted that his company sees it as beneficial for Google to assist Yahoo! with “an experiment.”
“This is a non-exclusive arrangement to allow Yahoo! to use some of our advertising capability to see whether it makes a significant difference to them as they seek … to make themselves a more profitable company.”
Yahoo! announced last week that it reached a non-exclusive agreement with Google, describing it as a “US$800 million annual revenue opportunity.”
Cerf also touted South Korea as possibly having “the biggest concentration of high-speed mobile capacity from anywhere else in the world.”
“This is why Google is so interested in being here in Korea because you represent an opportunity to experiment with very advanced mobile technology unlike anywhere else in the world,” he said. The country had 44.74 million mobile service users out of a population of 49 million as of the end of March, according to recent market reports.
Google launched its Korean operation in 2004 but has been struggling to increase its presence against homegrown tech giants such as NHN Corp. and Daum Communications Corp. South Korea is one of few places in the world where Google isn’t the dominant search engine.
Source: Trading Markets
