"The next billion" was a codename for "gaining access to Chinese markets", not "fooling tech-illiterate people into becoming Google loyalists". The reason why

"The next billion" was a codename for "gaining access to Chinese markets", not "fooling tech-illiterate people into becoming Google loyalists". The reason why the address bar is being tweaked in this manner isn't to hide the Internet from Internet users, it's to hide insecure parts of the URL. Only the domain name portion of a URL is actually secured by anything, and only the part closest to the right of the domain. Most people don't know or care that they need to run a set of regular expressions in their head and consult with a list of public suffixes to validate if a website is legitimate. They're just told, "Look for microsoft.com in the URL", and then they see http://123.45.67.89/~spam/microsoft.com/techsupport http://123.45.67.89/~spam/microsoft.com/techsupport and think "Well, it says Microsoft, that means it's Microsoft". It's not so much that Google doesn't want people knowing about the web, it's that people already don't know much about the web. It's not the people's job to know all of the relevant technical standards when they just want to know if a security alert in their e-mail is an actual thing they have to worry about or a phishing scam.