Sergey Brin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For a long time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin thought that you couldn’t. He thought that the internet was a force that had been unleashed upon the world, and no authority could ever put an effective control on it. But now, he says, he’s not so sure.
In interviews with The Guardian, Brin talks about how he thinks that the free internet is about to go through a dangerous gauntlet that might have the potential to break the world wide web as we have come to know it.
Brin points to three major factors that could start restricting the internet – state actors like China, Hollywood and its anti-piracy efforts, and companies like Facebook and Apple that put themselves in between users and the information on the internet.
We’re coming to a real fork in the road. SOPA, PIPA, CISPA – it seems like legislation to change the equation of information on the internet isn’t going to stop coming, and neither supporters or detractors are willing to budge an inch on some of the most basic philosophical questions at stake. Megaupload won’t be the last site to come under the fist of government intervention, and groups like Anonymous are only be getting started in their opposition to those same forces.
For Google’s part, some of the points Brin makes in the article remind people just how fragile all that data could actually be:
"Brin acknowledged that some people were anxious about the amount of their data that was now in the reach of US authorities because it sits on Google’s servers. He said the company was periodically forced to hand over data and sometimes prevented by legal restrictions from even notifying users that it had done so.
He said: “We push back a lot; we are able to turn down a lot of these requests. We do everything possible to protect the data. If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great … We’re doing it as well as can be done.”
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