The other thing I meant to emphasise is that Google’s commitment to openness ultimately depends on openness being the smart move for Google. Giving the company credit where credit is due is a big part of that, because if users understand that Google’s incentives for protecting user privacy are very different from, say, Facebook’s, then they’ll presumably end up rewarding Google for that.

At the same time, as someone who used to buy into the idea that Google would always fight for openness, fair use and apple pie, I think it’s important to realise that there are some pretty obvious limits to this principle. Check out the standard disclaimer for Google Book Search public domain books:

>Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

So I don’t think Google’s stances on openness and lock-in are written into the corporate DNA in quite the way that Rosenburg makes them out to be – it’s simply that Google’s core business model makes certain sorts of openness work.