Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to

There is no good public company that we should trust.

• Microsoft already demonstrated their desire and ability to slow the development of web standards. They only changed because of Google.
• Apple clearly shows how they prefer proprietary, non-interoperable apps. They would rather the people who can afford it pay a premium for access.
• Google, obviously, wants to provide free, often open, tools that allow them to collect more data.
• FB? They want data, and they don't even know where it's all going :-P

On the plus side, Chromium != Chrome. It's open source, and companies can prevent data collection to some extent - maybe not as much as Firefox. I understand the need for multiple browser engines to show that standards are actually interoperable, of course.

Back in the day, we were just happy to have a fast search engine and we believed their "do no evil" BS. Facebook's shenanigans hadn't yet come to light and it hadn't dawned on us yet - if we don't pay for a product; we are the product! How stupid were we.

My favorite detail, currently not very visible outside the GCP universe, is their Network Service Tiers concept: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/

While the numbers aren't disclosed publicly, Google's been quietly building a backbone network between their datacenters that (I'm fairly convinced) could rival the public internet. It would be a relatively simple software update to nudge Chrome browsers on to this "premium network" via VPN, and suddenly we're no longer on an open internet.

Every time I see a bit of coverage that indicates Chrome's dominance is growing, I always wonder how long it'll be before a very helpful, very innocently-marketed "security update!" pops up, promising to solve spam and harassment forever.