Web freedom faces greatest threat…

Murasama
… warns Google co-founder, Sergey Brin.

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.

Sergey also said it quite well right here as well:

“For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.”

Here, let me play my violin…

That is what Google cares about because data mining everything is the basis for how they make their money for targeted ads.  The app-centric world of iOS cuts Google’s crawlers out of the loop.  Google can’t crawl Facebook’s network to get at more bits of data which many easily hand over.  Google therefore has every reason to play the FUD angle on this one.

But wait, doesn’t Android have the greater marketshare?  Google loves to boast about their activation rates (a number which is constantly accelerating).  Android’s smartphone market share in the U.S stands at 50% versus the iPhone’s 30%.  On a global basis, Gartner said that Android smartphones exceeded a 50% market share compared to the iPhone’s 24%.

In that case, what does Google have to worry about when their open platform has the majority of users?  Oh yeah, I forgot that Google wants everyones information so they can capitalize on it.  And the obvious irony with Google attacking Facebook is this… pot meet kettle.  Facebook is literally in the same business of mining data on their own network and platform.  Both companies are in the business of turning the notion of privacy completely on its head.

I seriously wish that Apple would get its head out from their nether region when it comes to their web services initiatives so that I wouldn’t have to rely on and be a party to either Google or Facebook’s ulterior motives.  Photo Journals in the iOS version of iPhoto is a start but it is nowhere near what I can do in Picasaweb.  Plus that nonsensical web URL it provides is just obscene.  There is no longer an alternative to do sites/blogs either.  Apple has a lot of the pieces in place where it could easily do all of this stuff with either web based apps or their iOS and Mac based apps (like Pages and iPhoto for example).  And I really have no desire to run my own blogging software and gallery again.

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