Google’s co-founder criticises major rivals Facebook and Apple

Google's co-founder Sergey Brin was yesterday quoted as saying the rise of 'walled garden' like Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms, were restricting innovation online.

In an interview with The Guardian, the co-founder of Google, who now focuses most of his time on the company's innovation projects such as its amazing self-driving car, has warned that there are "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world" and described the situation as "scary".

While the 38 year-old billionaire is completely correct to bemoan those governments, such as China, who try to control web access and digital communication by their citizens, he turns hypocrite when criticising major rivals Facebook and Apple.

He describes Facebook and Apple's respective platforms as "restrictive walled gardens".

Of Facebook Brin says: "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is because the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

He is, of course, not the first person to criticise the walled gardens of the internet for suffocating the initial dreams for the open web. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has been highly critical of any site which limits the flowing of freely available information across the web.

Writing a piece in the Scientific American journal in 2010, entitled Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Berners-Lee sought to remind people of the power of the open and democratic web. In the article he, like Brin, espoused that the web's democratic nature and universality was being threatened by some of its "most successful inhabitants" of late â€" specifically naming LinkedIn, Facebook and Friendster.

However, unlike Brin, Berners-Lee is not running a company aggressively trying to grow its own walled garden to take out Facebook.

The Google co-founder seems to have forgotten about Google+, his company's own attempt to create a social network â€" which prides itself on offering users total privacy.

If Google+ members want to share a photo, status update or any other piece content privately with their friends on the network, then they can.

If Google+ members want to seamlessly feed their status updates through to rival social networks Facebook or Twitter â€" they cannot.

Google+, by its very own definition, is the newest walled garden trying to make it big on the internet.

Google+, just like Facebook, fits Berners-Lee's description of a walled garden perfectly: "Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site's pages are on the web, but your data are not. You can access a web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."

In fact, the success of Google+ is such an important part of Larry Page's (Google's other founder) vision, he made all employees' bonuses dependant upon the success of it and every other social product, within a week of becoming chief executive of the search giant last year.

Google has been consistently struggling to compete against Facebook and create a successful social service which can compete effectively for people's time and personal data on the internet. Google+, its very own walled garden, which launched last year, has been expressly designed to solve this issue.

Brin has every right to be concerned about governments limiting web access. But when it comes to criticising Facebook and Apple about their walled gardens, he needs to remind himself of some of Google+'s core features and potentially have a word with Page about Google's 'social' strategy.