Google: A little more like Microsoft every day
Recently, Google made a series of changes to its Chrome end-user license agreement, including the removal of language that describes how users can terminate their relationship with Google, as ReadWriteWeb discovered. Evil? Nah.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a recurring beat in Google coverage rather than a one-off: after the September 2008 Chrome EULA backlash forced Google to rewrite its license terms, the company has now quietly removed language describing how users can terminate their relationship with Google — spotted by ReadWriteWeb. The commentary frames it as another data point in an older argument that Google was already failing the 'Microsoft litmus test' back in 2007, when its own conduct started resembling the incumbent it once defined itself against.
First-order effects
- Chrome users lose explicit contractual language about how to end their relationship with Google, weakening the exit path the original EULA spelled out.
- Google takes another reputational hit on openness — the exact criticism it absorbed in the earlier EULA fight — with watchdog blogs like ReadWriteWeb doing the discovery work.
Second-order effects
- Every future Chrome terms change now gets scrutinized through a 'drifting toward Microsoft' lens, raising the cost of even routine legal-housekeeping edits and pushing Google toward defensive transparency gestures.
- Rivals and open-web advocates gain a reusable talking point: the browser that was pitched as a cleaner alternative is accumulating the same lock-in behaviors users fled on the desktop.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform control migrates from product quality to terms-of-service and default settings — meaning user sovereignty over endpoints becomes a regulatory and competitive battleground in its own right, not just a privacy footnote.
- The 'don't be evil' differentiation erodes structurally: as distribution platforms mature, incumbency incentives (retention over exit, proprietary leverage over standards) tend to converge across companies regardless of founding ethos.
The trend: Platform companies converge on gatekeeping behavior as they mature — control of the endpoint (browser, OS, defaults) increasingly matters more than the openness promises made on the way up.