I have long been a fan of the UK’s Guardian. They have embraced the internet like no other newspaper publisher. One of my favorite examples of the many great things they have done was the crowdsourced investigation of the expenses of Members of Parliament. Now they are kicking off a seven day series titled “Battle for the internet” that will cover many of the same topics that make a regular appearance here on Continuations.
The series kicked off with a summary of an interview with Sergey Brin. When Larry Page took over as Google’s CEO, I had expressed my hope that the founder would embrace an open Internet ecosystem. The reality has been far from it. Still it was good to see Sergey publicly acknowledge the threats to the internet from apps and other walled gardens (in particular Facebook) but also from politics. Now if only he could help steer Google into understanding that the way to fight those threats is *not* by Google trying to fight them all by themselves (e.g., by building Google+) but rather by figuring out how to empower independent services.
Should be an interesting week of reading. And speaking of reading, there was a terrific piece in this Sunday’s New York Times about why cybercrimes’s economic impact tends to be vastly overstated.
