The mobile internet ecosystem has so much potential for communal benefit. For example, when using Google Maps, you're subtly and pleasantly invited to fill in a quick survey to describe travel conditions on the vehicle you're on. This helps everybody, in principle, and it's a low-cost and fun way to contribute something small to the community. There's power here. So much power from bottom-up semi-gamified contribution like this: people like helping each other, people like being useful. Millions of people, collaborating of their own free will to build something wonderful together.
But that power flows directly toward Google, not toward the community. We get some fraction of our labour returned to us as value, an improved mapping and routing service, but in general one has to imagine that the primary beneficiaries of systems like this are the corporate interests that put them in place. As sociopathic profit-maximizers, why else would they do it? They are unable to stop themselves from being evil, after all.
This suggests two lines of thought: first, a modest proposal of sorts. As the mobile internet ecosystem is, or should be, public infrastructure, could we "nationalise" Google? As it has metastasised beyond the bounds of any given nation, perhaps something stronger is warranted. As the generations that founded the UN leave us behind, the UN itself seems to be losing its authority and focus; but I can't think of any other sensible steward for all-humanity public infrastructure. Could we gift Google to the UN? Perhaps the revenue it brings could solve the UN's myriad funding woes. On the other hand, perhaps it would lead to a reverse-takeover of the UN itself, in the same way that DoubleClick ate early Google itself alive from the inside. Advertising agencies seem to be dangerous that way. (Mozilla beware.)
But second, a "free software" alternative to the dominant ecosystems would do well to pay attention to the potential for communal benefit. Rather than focusing on the device, and local apps, let's lift our ambition to our terminals being personal, yes, but part of a larger whole.
