• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 22, 2011

Asked about all the bad things that people do with the Internet by Google brand chief Andy Berndt during an interview at the Cannes Lions Festival, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, quipped, "It's always a shock to me that there are criminals using the internet. When we built the internet, we built it just for the legal people."

Schmidt quickly added that he was being "facetious," lest people start spewing "140 characters into their favorite tweeting engine."

His point is that people have always done bad things – even before the Internet – and that it makes sense that some people would do bad things with the Internet. But the overwhelming majority of things being done on the Internet, are positive, he said, and that improvements in Internet technology and distribution would actually make it easier to expose and catch bad guys.

Some of the overwhelmingly positive things it has been leading to, he said, was the shift of information power from a handful of elitists and corporations to, well, everyone in the world. Citing the ubiquitous distribution of smart phones connected to the Web, Schmidt said, "Literally 4 or 5 billion people having access to all their questions with all of the world's information."

That in turn is leading to the spread of other positive things, like democracies in oppressed communities around the world. He cited the impact on politics, and especially the "Arab Spring," and said, "This is just the beginning."

It's also leading to positive things for businesses.

"One of the things I learned is that the consumer market is much larger than those other markets," Schmidt said about the shift from an information marketplace controlled by businesses and technologists to average consumers. "The information market, for example is bigger than the IT market I grew up in. We've got many, many $1 billion markets ahead of us."