Uti­liz­ing a dif­fer­ent social net­work than Google+ will not solve the prob­lem which many peo­ple wish to address. Google’s pol­icy, and Google’s appar­ent desire to become an “iden­tity ser­vice,” will have a grow­ing impact on the Inter­net as a whole.

Let’s take pri­vacy and per­sonal safety off the table for the moment. If Google goes for­ward with inte­grat­ing Google+ pro­files with search, rank­ing sites up or down based on whether the site author has a Google+ pro­file or whether or not their pro­file is ver­i­fied, people’s real life income could be effected. Web traf­fic may very well be diverted away from rel­e­vant and trust­wor­thy sites sim­ply because the author does not have a Google+ account.  Google’s dom­i­nance in Search could allow Google to effec­tively hold search based traf­fic hostage, forc­ing those doing busi­ness online to cre­ate a Google+ pro­file, or lose web traf­fic related revenue.

And what of the peo­ple that have been using Google ser­vices under one pseu­do­nym or another for years that could sud­denly find them­selves with a Google Iden­tity Cri­sis because they are now required to have a Google Pro­file (now known as the Google+ pro­file), regard­less of whether they would have used Google+ at all? If Google is going to move for­ward with inte­gra­tion of Google+ into every Google branded ser­vice (as has been hinted at, if not stated out­right), wouldn’t that even­tu­ally be the case?  I imag­ine it would be a bit over­whelm­ing to seg­ment the TOS by indi­vid­ual Google ser­vice, not to men­tion very con­fus­ing for the aver­age user.

A great many of us have been using, pro­mot­ing, even evan­ge­liz­ing Google ser­vices for years. I myself have been doing so since Google Search first hit the scene. And after all this time, build­ing the brand with adver­tis­ing rev­enue gen­er­ated from search results full of pseu­do­ny­mous and anony­mous web­sites, Google tells us all to piss off.

Some­one com­mented that the “Nymwars” move­ment is not a con­struc­tive effort, that there isn’t enough give and take, that it shouldn’t be “us against them.”  Well, it is “us against them.”  But I can guar­an­tee that for many pseudonym/anonymity sup­port­ers, it did not start out this way, and the “Nyms” cer­tainly did not ini­ti­ate the sen­ti­ment.  Take me for exam­ple.  I was the biggest Google fan I knew before see­ing the nam­ing pol­icy, and how it would be enforced, and the con­flict­ing state­ments made by Google about pseu­do­ny­mous even­tu­al­ity and iden­tity ser­vice pro­vid­ing. Now I find myself look­ing for alter­na­tives to ser­vices I have used since last cen­tury. I find myself fight­ing against the tide, try­ing to inform oth­ers of what is at stake, and tak­ing a stand for what I know is right.

The “Nymwars Move­ment” isn’t sim­ply about pri­vacy and per­sonal secu­rity, though both play a sig­nif­i­cant role. This is about the big­ger pic­ture where Google poten­tially dam­ages a much larger seg­ment of the Inter­net due to cou­pling Google+ pro­files with Google’s dom­i­nance in Search while attempt­ing to gen­er­ate the largest data­base of per­sonal infor­ma­tion and behav­ioral pat­terns ever seen. All while co-funding ven­tures with the CIA aimed at using just that sort of data to pre­dict the future (it still amazes me that this is actu­ally true). This is about Google attempt­ing to become the Inter­net rather than be part of it.

This is what Google promised us…

“We have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expres­sion in every­thing we do. We are dri­ven by a belief that more infor­ma­tion gen­er­ally means more choice, more free­dom and ulti­mately more power for the indi­vid­ual. We believe that it is impor­tant for free expres­sion that peo­ple have the right to remain anony­mous if they choose.”

–Rachel Whet­stone, Google Vice Pres­i­dent of Global Com­mu­ni­ca­tions & Pub­lic Affairs, April 2009

And this is what we have been given…

The com­mand of the old despo­tisms was Thou Shalt Not. The com­mand of the total­i­tar­i­ans was Thou Shalt. Our com­mand is Thou Art. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Every­one is washed clean.

–from George Orwell’s “1984”

You will likely see a lot of frus­tra­tion, a lot of anger, a lot of dis­be­lief, vent­ing, rant­ing, and rav­ing, over Google’s iden­tity poli­cies. This is no dif­fer­ent than any other move­ment through­out his­tory. Peo­ple are express­ing what they are feel­ing. That doesn’t mean they are not also try­ing to do some­thing con­struc­tive.  Some­times sim­ply hold­ing one’s ground is as con­struc­tive as one can be.