Google's Sergey Brin: state filtering of dissent threatens web freedom
Search giant's co-founder hits back at critics of his comments to the Guardian, echoing remarks made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. - Google co-founder Sergey Brin has hit back at critics of his exclusive comments to the Guardian about the importance of the open web, and emphasised that he thinks "government filtering of political dissent" poses the biggest threat to internet freedom. His words echo those of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, who told the Guardian this week that the UK government's plans for internet surveillance were dangerous. Writing on his personal account on the Google+ network , Brin said that his remarks "got particularly distorted in the secondary coverage" by rehashed versions of his discussion "in a way that distracts from my central tenets". Brin comes from a family who fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union. In his blogpost he reiterates the point made in the original article that he thinks governments, rather than individual companies, pose the biggest and most immediate threat to everyone's freedoms online.