There’s always people who’d argue that Google was always evil etc, and to be honest, I don’t quite agree. I like to think that if I were to start a company that had a chance of being large and influential (and anyone founding a search engine company knows they would be) I’d put some corporate ideology in place to prevent us from abusing that power.

But here’s the lesson: never assume what you are today is what you will become.

The right solution for Google in the 2000s wasn’t to continue developing email, web browsers, groups, mobile operating systems, etc, on the assumption that “It’s OK if we become dominant here, we’re totally not evil! We’d never abuse the power we have”, it would have been to hand off these technologies as soon as they became sufficiently important enough to others to own and manage. Android and Chrome, to name but two, should have been spun off into organizations similar to Canonical and Mozilla respectively.

Google, after all, had no reason to own those things at that time (if their motives were innocent) beyond wanting to make sure that Apple and Microsoft didn’t own the mobile space and web browser space respectively.

Their mistake - if you assume their motives were good at that time - was to insist on total future ownership of these technologies. They didn’t have to own them. They did anyway. The only reasons to own them were to use them to coordinate a future attack on openness and the ability to get away from Google’s infrastructure. But they insisted on owning them. And this is the result. DRM for the web. What a f—ing joke Google have become, and not the funny kind either.