{"id":230,"date":"2006-01-26T10:23:38","date_gmt":"2006-01-26T17:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=230"},"modified":"2006-01-26T10:23:38","modified_gmt":"2006-01-26T17:23:38","slug":"sergeys_educati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=230","title":{"rendered":"Sergey’s education"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I gradually grew comfortable, and I think we’re doing the right thing.” So says<\/a> Google wunderkind Sergey Brin, to a Fortune reporter, in defending the company’s decision to censor search results in China. That’s the way it always works. You start out with high-flown ideals, and then you “gradually grow comfortable” with breaking them, and finally you’re able to convince yourself that you’re “doing the right thing.” On the flight home from Davos, Brin might want to read some Thomas Hardy novels.<\/p>\n

But beyond the Google cofounder’s education in capitalist ethical situationalism (“Don’t Be Evil, Relatively Speaking”), this story brings into clear relief the broader situational fault lines of the internet. Whatever your feelings about filtering content, the fact is that search engines are now routinely choosing to filter out different types of content in different situations, usually in response to local laws or local social norms<\/a>. The Wild West days are over. The internet is being subsumed into the real world.<\/p>\n

Brin’s belief that the internet might exist in a separate uncompromised space, where all the world’s information is always available, unfiltered, to everyone, is not just a personal ideal; it’s one of the internet’s foundational ideals. And it’s a good ideal: it puts a stake in the ground. But it’s clear now that the future of the internet is going to be determined by how wisely we compromise that ideal, not by how fiercely we hold onto it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I gradually grew comfortable, and I think we’re doing the right thing.” So says Google wunderkind Sergey Brin, to a Fortune reporter, in defending the company’s decision to censor search results in China. That’s the way it always works. You start out with high-flown ideals, and then you “gradually grow comfortable” with breaking them, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}