Google’s Brin Warns Internet At Risk From China, Apple, Facebook

Google founder Sergey Brin has warned that the Internet is under threat from regimes such as China as well as the restrictive approach of companies such as Facebook and Apple.

The threats consist of governments trying to control communication in countries such as China and Iran, the entertainment industry’s heavy-handed efforts to combat piracy, and from the “walled gardens” of companies like Apple and Facebook who limit what software users can run within their systems, Brin said in a widely-reported interview with the Guardian newspaper.

China has put the genie back in the bottle

“I am more worried than I have been in the past,” the billionaire told the paper. “It’s scary.”

Google pulled out of China partially two years ago, following an attack on Google which had apparently come from the Chinese authorities. Brin admits he was complacent, underestimating the Chinese authorities’ ability to restrict the Internet and believing that the open net would prove impossible to contain.

“I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.

China is censoring Internet content with the so-called “Great Firewall of China”, and Iran has been blocking sites including Google and Facebook.  The regimes’ attitude to both companies is not without reason. Both were both regarded as useful resources during the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East in 2011. Google provided a voice-tweet service for Egyption protesters, and the company’s head of marketing for the Middle East, Wael Ghoneim, ran a Facebook page that helped promote the protests in Egypt. Facebook, meanwhile, added SSL security in a hurry to protect protesters from repression.

His criticism of Facebook and Apple has a different character. As well as criticising the firms for restricting what content and applications people can use, and for trying to force customers to stay within their own proprietary parts of the Internet, he criticises them for not opening up the data they hold to third parties such as Google.

“There’s a lot to be lost,” he said. “For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.”

Facebook and Google are engaged in a rivalry over social media. Google’s Google+ social network is struggling to compete against he 850 million people on Facebook, which is approaching a share flotation which is expected to value the whole company at around $100 billion.

Brin’s interview is part of a series at the Guardian which will also include interviews with others such as Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

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