Google's Brin: China Too 'Totalitarian'

Google's decision to stop service in China was based on the company's growing unease about the compromises required by Beijing, co-founder Sergey Brin tells the Wall Street Journal. The censorship exercised by the government reminded him of life in the Soviet Union, which Brin and his parents left when he was 6.

"I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling," he says. Things got worse after the Olympics, and the cyber-attacks in January, allegedly perpetrated by the government to spy on activists, were "the straw that broke the camel's back." Brin says he holds out hope "that the long-term solution is the liberalization of the Internet in mainland China."