Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union in 1973; his family emigrated to the United States in 1979. In 1998, Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page at Stanford University, subsequently serving as President of Technology. Google grew rapidly into the world's largest internet search engine.

In 2010, following the discovery that Google's systems had been targeted by cyberattacks originating from China, Brin stated publicly that the company could no longer operate under censorship, and was central to Google's decision to announce the end of filtering for Chinese search results and ultimately to redirect google.cn to Hong Kong servers. Brin has on multiple occasions referred publicly to his experience growing up in the Soviet Union as having given him first-hand understanding of information control; this background was widely cited in accounts of the 2010 decision.