Sergey Brin Complains About Facebook
Apparently, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is noticing that things are changing for the worse on the Internet. In an interview with the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, Brin managed to express his concern for the future of the Web. In fact, he was only expressing his concern for the future of Google, which will suffer if these trends continue.
In particular, he worries about governments’ capabilities to censor the Internet and the amount of control companies like Facebook and Apple have over their platforms and customers. “There’s a lot to be lost,” he said to The Guardian. “For example, all the information in apps—that data is not crawlable by Web crawlers. You can’t search it.”
His remarks were aimed at Facebook more than the onerous government censorship we are beginning to see everywhere, including in the U.S. Of course, he doesn’t mention any of the self-imposed censorship done by the industry itself, such as corporate filtering mechanisms that maintain a list of banned blogs. This is done by independent contractors and ISPs, too. For instance, my news blog cannot be accessed in much of Korea and Russia. Why? Who knows. There is no mechanism so you can find out and no mechanism for recourse. Brin never mentions this.
Instead, we get an orchestrated rant against his nemesis, Facebook.
All these companies are paranoid and Google is up there with Microsoft during the Gates era. They see everything as a threat to their core business when the real threat is paranoia itself. He rails against Facebook and other proprietary closed systems because there is no way to search them for information. As far as Brin is concerned, they need to be part of an open, searchable Internet. Google also cannot search my dresser drawers in my bedroom. Is he going to complain about that, too?
There are tons of dark sites, as determined by robots.txt, the code that tells the Google search engine that the site should not be searched and cataloged. Why doesn’t he complain about that? I actually assume that Google does search and catalog these sites but does not publish the results in its search results.