Google has an orientation that is opposed to my agenda. I joined the internet in 1992. It was a pretty decentralized place, and any person on it could set up an online service accessible to any other person on it; but you pretty much had to write your service in C (less of a security worry at the time) and it was easy to get in trouble by bogging down the DECStation you shared with fifty other people. So it was such a hassle that there were only a few dozen online services, plus a few thousand FTP sites. As an example, there were no public porn sites, although there was lots of porn.
A few years later, when the internet hit mainstream, it was a decentralizing force; server-centric Novell LANs and mainframe-terminal networks gave way to workstation networks, where anybody at the company, or anybody with an ISP account, could set up a web server on their personal workstation with a little trouble. I started running my own mail and web server when I moved to Ohio in 1997, and I’ve been running one ever since, first alone and later with half a dozen friends. Until 2001 it was on dialup, which was fine, although obviously there are limits on how much traffic I could cope with. But this rosy picture is complicated by centralizing forces. Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what “apps” they allow in their “app store”. Google wants you to keep your mail in Gmail instead of on your home computer (if you kept your mail on your home computer, you’d keep your backups on your friends’ home computers), and they’ll delete your account with no recourse if you admit you’re only 10. Microsoft won’t let you run unsigned device drivers on your own computer any more. Facebook wants to know every web page you visit, anywhere on the internet, and log that information permanently for later analysis. And email from our little mail server automatically gets dropped into the spam box on Gmail these days. Not sure why. Apparently our domain has a “bad reputation”, but even finding that out required an inside connection; no way to find out more. I imagine a different future, where if Alice wants to talk to Bob and Bob wants to talk to Alice, there’s no unaccountable intermediary that can interfere with their communication, whether they’re speaking text, or video, or 3-D models, or simulation. If Alice’s email gets marked as spam, Bob ought to be able to find out why — and fix it! I imagine a future where every human being can participate in creating the culture they live in, without needing permission from anybody, and without fearing repercussions. We’re a lot closer to that world today than we were in 1992, and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa; the revelation and destruction of the nascent government-funded slander campaign against Glenn Greenwald and other WikiLeaks supporters; and the public discovery of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” flights. If we successfully beat back the global menaces of governmental corruption, global warming, overfishing, and terrorism, it will be because we were able to collaborate and organize more effectively around the world by means of this new medium. Google, of course, wants to solve these problems too. But it has a different, less-democratic approach in mind. While of course the company contains an enormous diversity of opinion internally, their approach publicly has been somewhat paternalistic, and their engineering culture is organized around big centralized solutions; warehouse-scale computing, as the title of Barroso and Hölzle’s excellent book puts it. Google’s undemocratic orientation sometimes leads them to impose policies at odds with my vision of the future. Their “real names” policy on Google+ is one example; it makes it likely that only people who feel they have no repercussions to fear from anyone, ever, will write there. There has been quite a [backlash][], but they do not appear to be interested in compromising. [backlash]: http://my.nameis.me/ A rather shocking view of the depth of some Googlers’ commitment to centralized computing can be found in [Steven Levy’s recent article][Skype]. After thinking about it for a while, I realized they were right factually, if not normatively: peer-to-peer overlay networks are [inherently inefficient][] on today’s residential internet. [Skype]: http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/05/10/why-google-does-not-own-skype (Why Google does not own Skype, 2011-05-10, by Steven Levy) [inherently inefficient]: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000935.html (“Peer-to-peer overlay networks are a bad idea on a DSL-based internet”, by me, 2011-08-18.) I believe that warehouse-scale client-server computing will, in the end, undermine the kind of democratic freedom of communication that we need to deal with today’s global menaces. It’s more practical than peer-to-peer computing at the moment, but that pendulum has swung back and forth several times over the decades. (Some of my friends were among the first employees of a hot cloud-computing startup, in 1964, called Tymshare.) The proper response to the current impracticality of decentralized computing is not to sigh and build centralized systems. The proper response is to build the systems to *make decentralized computing practical again*. Google is not institutionally opposed to this; they’ve funded substantial and important work on it. Nevertheless, because of their overall orientation toward centralized solutions with undemocratically-imposed policies, I believe working there would be a further distraction from that goal. Worse, with every advance that companies like Google and Apple make, the higher is the bar that decentralized systems must leap to achieve real adoption. I’m not making much progress on that. My friends Len Sassaman (who committed suicide in the first few days of July), Bram Cohen, Jacob Appelbaum, and Zooko O’Whielacronx have made substantial contributions. But I don’t think I’d make *more* progress at Google, and I might make *negative* progress. So that’s why I don’t want to work at Google. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-tol
