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Google: Why Sergey Brin Is Worried About The Internet

This article is more than 10 years old.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is worried about the Internet. Very worried.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin asserted that there are greater threats to the Net today than he's ever seen before. There are, he said "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," he said. "It's scary."

Brin asserts that the there are threats from governments trying to control access and communications, from the entertainment industry trying to crack down in piracy and from the rise of walled gardens from Apple, Facebook and others.

On the risks of walled gardens, Brin worries about the lack of access for his company's indexing spiders. "There's a lot to be lost," he told the Guardian. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by Web crawlers. You can't search it."

Brin said Google couldn't have been created in a world in which Facebook dominates the Internet. "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."

He also showed some sympathy for consumers who downloaded pirated content. "I haven't tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like; it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work – and then when you have to jump through all these hoops [to buy legitimate content], the walls created are disincentives for people to buy," he said.