Villa: Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it

By the bye, for those who sensibly judge an aging net denizen as beneath consideration; hoary old NNTP seems to be still be actively with us, and not -entirely- as a means to transmit contraband.

That's how software is failing: it does not disappear overnight. I know many places where people still use old Turbo Pascal 3.01A-based programs. And PDP-11 (emulated in Itanium which soon will be emulated on something else, I guess). But as far as "Joe Average" is considered RSS is as relevant as Gopher (slightly more relevant then Multics in 2000, but not by much).

tpo wrote:

Lately I am getting the impression, that even though Google is innovating hard, whenever it puts down its foot somewhere, it immediately kills the whole ecosystem there (oh, how similar to ex-Microsoft).

The depressing thing here is the fact that Google usually does not try to actively kill an existing habitats. Usually it tries to be quite friendly to its competitors (unless these are titans like Facebook or Microsoft), but this just means that where Microsoft destroys competitors in hurry with a lot of racket and ill-will Google destroys them slowly but silently yet just as surely (usually when victim finally declares "kaput" the general public reaction is "huh? ___ was still around all that time?).

This is depressing because for Microsoft's behavior there is an answer: "stop using illegal means and everything will be fine!", but what can Google do? Purposefully make it's own product worse? Stop innovating and trying to expand into a new niches? Makes no sense whatsoever.

Even though I had thrown down the gauntlet, and you picked it up, I had hoped somebody else would take it up to reply in depth. I'll try now but I'm hardly apt to give you a thorough analysis. In the following whenever I say Google I'll also mean the people that work there.

First: "with great power comes great responsibility". This has many aspects:

For one, once you get to be a monopoly, as Google is in many respects (or maybe rather is the hub), legal free market rules stop to apply to you and the law will (should) be looking at you with extra scrutiny. Rightfully so.

The way that Google or Googlers talk - your post above is a good example - is as if they were not a monopoly. But Google is not naive. They own the most brilliant tech minds so it's out of question, that Google wouldn't know this absolutely well. So why do they talk as if they wouldn't be one with all the consequences that has?

I am stricken by the fact that in many a bright mind's public critical thinking, once she would start working for Google, Google would suddenly be excluded from being critically looked upon.

Take Tim Bray. Before starting to work for Google, I had the impression, that he had quite clear open source principles. The moment he was with Google, any critical mention of Google or its extremely ambiguous relation with open source had completely disappeared.

Take Steve Yegge. His tongue is extremely sharp. But Google is never his target directly. His meant to be internal only posting on Google seemed to cause him a lot of distress.

Why is that? Is the land of the 72 virgins you get to once you are accepted into Google that alluring that you instantly selfcensor out of fear of withdrawal of that drug?

Or is Google so afraid of any self criticism that it all but draconically prohibits any such open utterance? Your own generous but mercyles big brother with his firm hand on your shoulder?

Or is there some rules that says criticism is OK, but it has to remain inside the Famiglia? At which point you are part of the Famiglia and anybody outside isn't (that must be producing very powerful dilemmas of loyality).

Certainly the most powerful usage of critique is to take it as a source for improvements. So it would be absurd if Google would not encourage critique?

I am aware that human nature and by extension corporate nature doesn't take critique easily and thus, its dosage has to be well adjusted in order to be constructive. Nevertheless, it feels like some psychological blocking mechanism is active at Google.

Is maybe Google's schizophrenic relation to the world the cause for that (alleged) cognitive dysfunction (it's own misperception of being a good, non-monopolistic, non-evil company)?

I am under the impression that in its beginning Google was actually saying that it would not be collecting personal information but instead exclusively statistical ones. That is not so today. Google's greed for data correlation seems to be insatiable. It's clear as the sun to every hacker, that this huge collection of personal data is a ticking, distressing timebomb that will explode with statistically 100% probability. In the end it's the worth of the data that determines the effort for the attack and the data only keeps growing. There have allready been casualities but those we know of were "only somewhere remote in China".

As the Safary incident and the WLAN sniffing showed, Google's lust for data is so big, that it will even break your system and collect data even if is very clearly illegal.

My whole defence system - RefControl, RequestPolicy, Cookie Monster, NoScript, blackholing via /etc/hosts - is 99% in defense against Google. There's hardly any web site on earth any more that doesn't dutifully funnel all your movements on the web back to Google.

To me this is a schizophrenic situation: Big Brother is watching you everwhere on the web and it says it is your friend.

I slow down here and pick up from where I started. You said:

The depressing thing here is the fact that Google usually does not try to actively kill an existing habitats.

I note that this does not have to necessarily be a conscious "takeover" strategy, but again, I doubt that Googlers can really be this naive not to be aware of the mechanism in action:

If even a small group of Googlers decides to dedicate their 20% of hobby time to some pet project, then allready their combined resources might be higher, than most but the very largest of the existing open source projects. So how are those smaller projects supposed to be "competing" with Google? Why should those smaller projects be competing with Google if it has way better infrastructure, more dev ressources, a product that extends and improves on the existing, can integrate the product with its other offerings, has the brightest minds and the cost is zero? Why should the community except for the stubborn ones and the fundamentalist idealists not leave the field?

The fact that it's a fun or a hobby project does not exclude you from the "with great power..." context.

But that's still not everything. Those pet projects might ascend to higher levels and of course Google has people that are thinking about strategy and induce from those strategic products. So when some pet projects gets promoted or when decisions are made about which projects to keep and which to abandon, ways of moving the userbase off to those strategic products are being thought out.

Now if you go back and compare all this with that article dberkholz had linked to it's exhilarating how it matches my fantasizing here down to the "But I'm now a Google employee and won't comment further".

At this point I'll cut my argumentation and say that I actually do not doubt the Googlers' good intentions to make the internet and the world a nicer place to be. Theirs is certainly not a cynic approach. But the schizophrenic reality fade out needs to be dealt with somehow. I don't know how. Being a monopoly means that the company and its products are in a way a "public infrastructure". The huge looming data breach and potential of corruption and total control and the secret data hustling screams for democratic oversight. In the end giving the user something and not openly telling him about what he'll have to pay in exchange is a lie. I think that is the root of all the resulting evil. People need to be fully aware of what they are getting into. Any way of exploiting this unawareness for your own goals and profit is in the end a deceit.

That's it. It's way too long, but I think it needed a couple of arguments to do justice to the breadth of the problem. Now you can with pleasure rip all my arguments to shreds.