Over the past week, news surfaced revealing Google's plans to launch a search engine, a news app, and cloud services in mainland China. Re-launching a search tool and other products would inevitably force it to comply with China's censorship regime, which entails blocking access to information the government considers too politically sensitive. As recounted in Steven Levy's book In the Plex, while Google executives like Eric Schmidt were confident that launching a censored search engine in China would be worth the political cost, Brin was more ambivalent. Speaking to the New York Times, the engineer explained that benefits of increasing access to information in China outweighed the potential costs of complying with orders to censor search results. Even after Google's China debacle, Brin has issued warnings about the threats that the internet and new technologies can pose on civil liberties. In 2012, on his Google Plus account, he wrote "The primary threat by far to internet freedom is government filtering of political dissent." But Brin's influence at Google has been minimal since he assumed the role of president of Alphabet, Google's parent company, in 2015.Sundar Pichai, who became Google's CEO in 2015, hasn't commented much on how its re-entry into China might square with its commitment to information access and an open internet. Since Pichai took over, Google has made a number of overtures to China, including plans for an AI research lab in Beijing. Read more