Censorship, in some form or another, is in a lot more places than some would expect. From the adjustments of content in movies and television to adjust to market pressures to the outright blocking of some entire websites in other countries, censorship by degrees is alive and well. But Google (News - Alert)'s Eric Schmidt, meanwhile, thinks that censorship's day is rapidly coming to a close, and within the next 10 years, may well be gone outright.

It may sound outlandish, but Schmidt—while speaking at Johns Hopkins University—noted that censorship methods can really only go so far in the face of encryption and technological advancement, essentially noting one of technology's greatest aphorisms: what one can do, another can undo. Schmidt also referred to his January trip to North Korea, noting that the attempts the country had made in terms of restricting the flow of information into its borders had largely failed. Schmidt issued an open appeal during a press conference in Beijing for the country to relax its Web restrictions, but since Schmidt has yet to be invited back to North Korea, it's a safe bet that that appeal has fallen on deaf ears.

Yet at the same time—particularly in light of the PRISM affair and further revelations from Edward Snowden—censorship, as well as surveillance, even has been found to occur in the United States. Google, for example, was recently seen filing a set of official complaints with several government agencies, including President Barack Obama himself, and Google has even found itself under the gun over privacy breaches of its own, with a recent $17 million settlement over tracking certain users on iPhone (News - Alert). But here, according to Schmidt, there's one central theme that hurts censorship: encryption.

Schmidt elaborated, saying “It's pretty clear to me that government surveillance and the way in which governments are doing this will be here to stay in some form, because it's how the citizens will express themselves, and the governments will want to know what they're doing. In that race, I think the censors will lose, and I think that people would be empowered.”

On a certain level, Schmidt is right. If it becomes too difficult for a body like a corporation or a government to crack encryption, censorship becomes meaningless. If it can't be read easily, then checking it for certain parts contrary to standards of decency or thought or anything else becomes too cumbersome a task in which to engage. It effectively forces the censor to commit enormous amounts of resources into decryption, and eventually, outstrips the total available resources. Censorship online is already difficult enough in an era where content can be removed at one point and posted in five others in a matter of hours.

But Schmidt may be overlooking a critical point about governments' development of decryption and encryption capabilities. Governments may well be much farther ahead of regular citizens than anyone knows, so Schmidt's projections of a decade to a censor-free society may not hit. Plus, it assumes that those who develop encryption technology won't in turn provide—or be forced to provide—decryption keys to those governments as a condition of continued existence, or for a simple payoff.

Still, it is a nice ambition, and one that may well be more doable than anyone expects. A society in which ideas flow freely, but encrypted, may well be the first step to a society with absolutely free information.