Feedburner evil? Dave Winer warns of a scenario July 22, 2007
Posted by John in Technology.trackback
Dave Winer who has lived through the many tech cycles makes a very astute observation about the implications of Feedburner. This isn’t the first time someone brought this up (although maybe we all think it) but Todd Cochrane at Geeknewscentral warned of this awhile back.
Think about this evil scenaro: say Google doesn’t like a certain political view then they could in theory do the evil thing…shut down feeds for all influencial blogs that have certain political opinions… never mind the technical implications about open innovation. In an open API world Google needs to think about this… go open or go closed…
We’ll see about this with YouTube and their upcoming GPhone among other areas???
Google could do that… and watch as the majority of its Feedburner and Google Reader customers instantly migrated over to another platform.
In other words, there is no danger. Dave has no argument about *why* Google would ever do such a thing, or *how* it would enforce its lock-in. There is no reason for them to ever do it, and there is no technical method of stopping people just jumping ship if they did.
Google is many things, but suicidal isn’t one of them.