Five or ten years ago, I trusted Google to act in the best interests of the web and humanity in general. This is the specific trust that I and many others have now lost. It can now be assumed that Google will act in their own corporate bests interests whenever possible. This is not terribly surprising, as it is the basic mode of operation for companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, but it is a change for Google. I now trust Google to wiretap my communications in any and all countries with surveillance programs. I now trust Google to terminate any projects that are beneficial to the market but not to Google. I expect Google to modify public-friendly projects such as Chrome and Android to be public-hostile and Google-friendly.
I'm very sure I am not alone here. I'm talking to the people here on HN who feel the same way that I do:
How are we going to make this work? Should we fork Chrome and Android and try to get community backing for forks that we can control before it becomes too late? If we act now, we may be able to do something before we end up with the kind of stagnation we had from IE6.