Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said in a recent interview with The Guardian that the open internet presently has a large array of forces opposing it, a situation that he describes as “scary,”
Brin lists government attempts to control the internet and the way that their citizens communicate, the American entertainment industry’s lobbying for harsher piracy laws and the advent of walled gardens like those employed by Facebook and Apple as reasons to be “worried” about the future of an open internet.
He is most concerned by attempts by China, Saudi Arabia and Iran’s attempts, in China’s case largely successful attempts, to censor the information that their respective peoples are able to access on the internet. He goes on to say that Facebook and Apple, by rigidly regulating how information is gathered and can be used within their own proprietary systems, risk slowing down and stifling innovation on the net.
Brin also criticised the entertainment industry, like the RIAA and MPAA, who are pushing for bills like SOPA and PIPA in order to defend their IPs, saying that it [the entertainment industry] would be “shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot” by opening the door for technology and laws in the States that perform the same functions used by China to censor its citizens.
Source: The Guardian