China’s efforts to “purify” the internet by cracking down on websites such as Google may be as much driven by protectionism as ideology, the founders of the US search engine said on Friday. “I think a lot of these challenges and policing may be side effects of lobbying by local competitors there,” Sergey Brin, Google’s president of technology, told reporters... “On a business level, that decision to enter China was a net negative based on our reputation in the rest of the world suffering,” Mr Brin added, citing the controversy over Google’s decision to censor the Chinese version of its website...