I'm pretty sure everyone realizes what proxying all non-Google content through their servers does. The thing is, people who rely on Google are more afraid of it

I'm pretty sure everyone realizes what proxying all non-Google content through their servers does. The thing is, people who rely on Google are more afraid of it going away than they are upset at the lengths by which Google asserts itself over their life. It's really funny to me. They already had Android Chrome's "traffic optimizer" to tunnel all traffic through their servers. But I guess they wanted Safari and other mobile content as well, so they made this crappy web proxy, and now it affects everyone's use of the web. Like... they really didn't have to do this. But they knew they could, and knew it would only provide a minor annoyance to most people, so they did it. And predictably, people defend it, as if reinventing WAP were a good idea. (To be fair: when I used a J2ME phone, I wrote WAP web services. But I'm not runnning a J2ME phone any more.)