Sergei Brin: Apple, Facebook and governments threaten free internet

Google co-founder Sergei Brin has identified Apple, Facebook, and totalitarian governments as the biggest threats to a free and open internet, during a recent interview.

In the interview, Brin told The Guardian that the combination of the “walled garden” approach used by Apple and Facebook, combined with the internet censorship undertaken by governments such as Iran and China, posed a significant threat to the future of internet freedom.

“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,” Brin said.

“All the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by [search engine] web crawlers. You can’t search it.”