“I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.” […]

“You have to play by [Facebook's] rules, which are really restrictive,” he said. “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.”

While Google still has a presence in China and has been adding to its team of engineers in the country, it has remained critical of the government’s hardline stance on web censorship ever since its high profile decision to relocate its search business to Hong Kong in early 2010. As if to validate Brin’s words, Hu Jintao’s government has continued with a vengeance its unprecedented online crack down designed to quell any potential social disorder, or even worse, political protest, ahead of the Party’s leadership handover next year.

First thing I’d say to Brin, if you’re sincere in your concern for the open web, why aren’t you leading it?

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) April 15, 2012

This interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin is such a joke, especially where he criticizes Facebook and Apple: guardian.co.uk/technology/201…

— Bobby Solomon (@thefoxisblack) April 16, 2012

Having a “walled garden” means Google can’t crawl your data and sell ads against it, which is why they hate it.

— Bobby Solomon (@thefoxisblack) April 16, 2012

Brin is right here in some ways bit.ly/HJZlww but it’s a self-serving argument: what is good for Google = good for web freedom.

— Andrew Keen (@ajkeen) April 15, 2012

“It’s hard to tell if this is true concern over the freedom of the internet or whether—as the cynics among you may leap to suggest—it’s a case of hitting out at an extremely successful competitor.”

Sergey Brin isn’t wrong to claim that Apple and Facebook are threats to the Internet. He’s wrong to exclude Google from that list.

— Peter Bright (@DrPizza) April 16, 2012

“There’s a profound audacity in Brin bundling internet censorship in regimes like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which restrict user access to the web, with Facebook and Apple’s platforms, which restrict Google’s.

There may be a continuum of control and closure of the internet that connects repressive governments at one end and overbearing corporations at the other. The fight over the SOPA/PIPA legislation, where entertainment and technology companies, along with their users, fought it out in the halls of Congress, doubtlessly lies somewhere in between.

But Google is likewise doubtlessly a part of that continuum, not apart from it.”