Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder everybody keeps forgetting about except when he talks about stuff like this, has pointed to a handful of “threats to internet freedom” – Facebook, Apple, the entertainment industry, and governments that censor their citizens. By which I guess he means threats to Google.

Said Brin in an interview with The Guardian yesterday:

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.

…

[There are] very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried than I have been in the past. It’s scary.

Of course, Facebook, Apple, the entertainment industry and government censorship all transpose neatly onto some trouble Google’s been having lately – Facebook and Apple both being  massive competitors of Google’s, the entertainment industry has been kicking at YouTube and Google Books since they started up, and Google had to pull out of China due to censorship attacks not so long ago (to say nothing of SOPA and PIPA).

Brin also kind of audaciously lumped together the censorship efforts of countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran (which keep people from accessing the web) with the “walled garden” platforms employed by Facebook and Apple (which Google can’t search and sell).

So I mean yes these things are challenges to “the open internet,” they are also challenges to Google. Which is not the same thing. And given how Google has been handing over data to the Supreme Court in the U.S., they’re not exactly de-regulating the internet either.

Says Brin,

If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great. We’re doing it as well as can be done.

[Source: Guardian]