Idea bubbles: An existential threat to the Internet

Google co-founder Sergey Brin believes there is a rising threat to the Internet the likes of which the world has not seen before. It just so happens that the biggest threats to the Internet are also Google’s biggest competitors. That’s right, Brin claims that Facebook and Apple represent an existential threat to the Internet.

However, just because Brin has a vested interest in scaring up some bad PR for Facebook and Apple doesn’t make it not true. Indeed, Brin makes a good point about the segmentation of the Internet into isolated hermetic bubbles. Facebook succeeded where MySpace failed: It’s not really an option for people living 21st Century social lives anymore, to the point where (like Google) it’s used to log in to other websites.

The phenomenon of using Google or Facebook to log in to a website is a throwback to a previous era of the Internet. Remember the dark days of AOL? Back then, you had to be a bit of a computer expert to access websites, newsgroups and other forms of data that weren’t easily spoon fed to you by AOL’s interface. This is hardly an idle consideration. Google, after all, is the company who helped to build the Great Firewall of China. Gee, kettle, you sure are black, said the pot.

There are implications for the world of innovations generally. In a world where the Internet is more closed off, either in the form of “national Internets” like the one Iran plans to roll out or corporate-backed bubbles, innovation will naturally be more sluggish. One of the reasons that the Internet has been such a hot factory of innovation is precisely because no one has total control over it. Anyone can make anything they see fit and let it sink or swim, making the Internet the perfect laboratory for tech, social media and entertainment innovation. A world where Apple, Facebook and Google act as gatekeepers is a world where innovation will increasingly have to go through bureaucratized channels.

We have some reason to be optimistic. Google’s dominance in the search engine world is being challenged and it has been largely unable to break into the world of social networking. Facebook, for its part, has a massive number of users. However, its user base are perhaps better likened to kidnapping victims: How many people do you know who would leave Facebook in a second if they had a better option? But there’s also the problem of who the main competitors are in the world of tech. Google’s main competitors are Bing and Yahoo!, hardly companies that can be held up as a model of grassroots innovation.

Even the best innovations in the world of tech and social media don’t count for much if people don’t know about them. If governments and Big Tech are controlling innovation, it is necessarily more restricted, less open and thus, more sluggish. Facebook might be able to recognize the value of something like Instagram, but it’s hard to imagine them coming up with it on their own. Further, as stated above, Google has shown a willingness to work with authoritarian governments to restrict the flow of information.

But one thing that rarely gets discussed is the effect of hermetically sealed bubbles without Big Government or Big Business restricting the flow of information. The proliferation of New Media has created a number of idea bubbles already -- how many people do you know read both the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report? In a world where people are content enough to seal themselves off into bubbles without any assistance from corporations or governments, there is an unquantifiable effect on the exchange of information and thus, innovation. A significant chilling effect will result if the natural propensity toward self-insulation becomes institutionalized.