Google’s Open Web

Ian Katz interviewed Sergey Brin 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. […]

“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.”

The assumption here is that the only way to search is through Google, and that the “open Internet” is only what Google can index and sell ads against.

★ Sunday, 15 April 2012