Brin is making a consumer advocacy argument. He’s giving an interview to a general media organization in the hopes of laying down grassroot support for Google; making consumers think of Google as “Open” and Facebook and Apple as “Closed”. Google is your friend; Apple and Facebook don’t care about you. But it’s a distorted view, since Google is guilty of some of the same sins. So Brin’s interview is essentially advertising: he’s attacking his company’s competitors and pumping his company.

His criticism is, itself, not immune to criticism. 

Well, since the internet is commercialized, just like the signposts in your town, there’s no getting away from information being in the hands of the powerful.  It seems like the key is to spread it out so the info is not just in the hands of a few companies, but dozens and hundreds of them.

Facebook may end up more like eBay, which is successful because it is the default, not because it’s the best.

I swear, people on this thread are more concerned with Brin’s altruism than with the actual issue he raises.  Closed gardens are not just a threat to Google indexing; they are threats to free access to information.  

As David Brin has pointed out, loss of privacy is not a big issue if it is shared evenly.  If data is concentrated in the hands of the powerful, then it is a huge threat to democracy and freedom.

My point is that the threats that Sergey points out are far greater than the threat to you if he is or is not being hypocritical.   If a restaurant owner stood up against the death penalty, would you brush it off by saying that he was only trying to maintain his customer base?

Page and Brin may be self interested,  but they do truly care about human knowledge, and closed gardens are legitimate threats.

The worst thread is that closed gardens offer a single point of contact for government censorship.   That alone should concern you more than Brin’s conflict of interest.

Allow me to welcome Brin to my Blogger site, which pushes me to a .ca URL unless I go out of my way to fuck with their stupid system.

“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.”

Allow me to welcome Brin to my Google-owned Blogger site, which, if you do a site search of the .ca version of it, reveals no content at all.

Fast forward and your ISP will use FB to log you in first, then you will navigate the web from inside FB. Future generations will never fully realize what the web was. FB is the solution that governments and corporations needed (wanted). A pseudo  open forum. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if FB had all the support from the US government (conspiracy theories aside) and all the “social media helped fuel the Arab Spring” was just PR to help concquer the restless.

A bit saved is a bit earned, as it were.

In for a bit, in for a byte.

I’m not saying that this shouldn’t be pushed back against, but it might help to think about what may be longer term goals as we struggle through today’s tug of war over information flows. It might help align interests in the other side of the fight – forcing a restoration of transparency in government and business activities.

But he also built an empire that’s based on control of information, and when you’re collecting so much nectar in big barrels, stirring it up and heating it to attract bees, it’s no surprise that some flies show up to the party along with it. His company is really no better than Facebook in this regard – Google’s business model has always been based on commodifying their customer’s personal information (their search habits and interests rather than their social network graph) for sale to third parties.

Ultimately I think having a problem with the private control and commodification of information is isomorphic with having a problem with capitalism. Which I do, but I get that not everyone is on the same page as me.

This is akin to asking Sergei “Why don’t you collect less money and delete an opportunity to make more?”