Google. They’re not like all these other multi-biliion-dollar companies that are always doing horrible things.
They care about your securitah!
Google are totally the good guys! They even have “Don’t be Evil” as their motto!
All the things they do are totally for Teh Securitah and altruistic, and not at all anticompetitive or about locking you into their ecosystem, or about gaining more control of the web.
For instance, their plan to lock android down to make it extremely difficult to use software from non-google-approved sources? That’s totally for Teh Securitah! If you think it looks like a purely anti-competitive thing then you just haven’t considered the fact that a user who clicks through 5 different things to install a different app store might be tricked into accidentally clicking through those 5 steps in order to install malware! or even spyware! This is totally a likely thing that could happen to at least 1 person. If google’s solution seems anti-competitive that’s just, like, your opinion man. And, look, even if it does happen to lock down what has historically been an open platform and lock out alternative app stores and ecosystems, that’s just totally a coincidence, and not at all intentionally anti-competitive behaviour.
And manifest v3. That’s totally for Teh Securitah. Look, OK, it does just so happen to make it impossible to block the ads that google relies on for revenue, but that’s totally a coincidence! Pinky promise! They need to stop extension authors from blocking web requests because……..uh……..Teh Securitah! So as you can see, it’s all perfectly fine and you have nothing to worry your pretty little head about. And anyway, it’s not like an ad has ever served up anything malicious – there’s not any legit reason why you’d want to block advertising anyway.
Replacing google earth with a terrible, slow, less-featureful, web-based version where all your data is stored on google’s servers and they charge you per-month on a tiered basis depending on what features you want, rather than it just being a good, free desktop application with zero attack surface where you are in total control of your data? That’s definitely for Teh Securitah!
Marking mail from people who are in your address book, which is replying to an email you sent them, as spam because they had the gall to use an email provider that isn’t google reasons they can’t be bothered disclosing? That’s for Teh Securitah, and definitely not to push people onto their email service which spies on all your email content (something they also, obviously, do for Teh Securitah).
Did you want to contact google to ask them a question to figure out whether you want to sign up for a google account? You’ll need a google account for that. For Teh Securitah.
See, everything google does is for you. It’s for your securitah. It’s not at all about ensuring that no competition can ever threaten them, or tracking your every eye movement in some perverse dystopian panopticon. It’s all for Teh Securitah.
They’re a lot like valve in that respect: totally altruistic, only interested in what is best for their users, and always doing what is right and good. They would never, for example, violate consumer protection laws in order to try to keep your $2.49. That one time it happened to thousands of people for like a decade and a half was just an honest misunderstanding.
I’m so glad we have this new brand of good companies who only incidentally hurt people, break laws, and destroy competition, rather than it being like it was in the bad old days of Microsoft et al.