“The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin,” Ian Katz reports for The Guardian.
“The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of ‘restrictive’ walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms,” Katz reports. “He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web. ‘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.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Certain governments are definitely a concern, but Brin’s characterization of Apple and Facebook are at least as hypocritical as Microsoft’s Gates and Ballmer for years serially claiming to be “innovators.”
Google wants access to traipse around everywhere, looking under every rock, sampling everything in the entire garden in which others work the land, while Google profits from the fruits of their labor. Besides trying to copy other’s mobile OSes or social networks in order to attempt to gain access to or at least weaken certain garden “walls,” gathering detailed lists of what’s in the garden in order to sell ads for fertilizer, shovels, and hoes is Google’s business model. There’s nothing wrong with this, but would Google grant such complete access to competitors? Is Google for such “Internet freedom” for other search engines and/or online advertising firms?
We submit that all of these “walls,” or even just the prospect of them, have caused Google to lose their way.
What if we don’t want Google, or any one entity, to have access to all the world’s data? Perhaps it’s better, even if we sometimes have to sacrifice a bit of convenience and search a little harder, if there is no monolithic gatekeeper?
And why have Google recently embarked on a PR tour? Do they have internal polling? Are they concerned about their company’s image?
Related articles:
Google’s Larry Page: Steve Jobs’ fury over Android was ‘for show’ – April 4, 2012
James Whittaker: Why I left Google – March 14, 2012
What is up with Eric Schmidt’s revisionist history of his relationship with Steve Jobs? – October 14, 2011