Google co-founder warns of ‘scary’ threats to web freedom
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has warned that the rise of ‘walled gardens’ in the form of Facebook and Apple alongside increasingly restrictive moves on the part of governments, are putting the web freedom’s we have taken for granted at risk.
Speaking to the guardian Brin claimed that the threats posed today were “scary”, noting that “powerful forces” were now arrayed against an open internet.
Brin identifies these forces as a three pronged attack in the form of national governments clamping down on their citizens rights, the entertainment industries crackdown on piracy and internet giants such as Apple and Facebook which plump for restrictive platforms which are walled off from the rest of the internet.
In the interview Brin lamented: "There's a lot to be lost. For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."
Brin further alleged that Larry Page would have been unable to create the search giant in an environment that was already dominated by Facebook, he said: "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."