Recently I was fortunate enough to talk to a bright young up and coming web programmer /developer star. I asked him what he thought was the main development happening in the internet sphere and his reply was OpenID. Phew. For me that spells the equivalent of numbers tattooed on arms and microchips in the brain and iris IDs at airports. Oh, of course they are doing the last already.

I kind of squirmed and said that I had a problem with Big Brother tendencies of large companies. And he felt that too often evil had been attached to the work being done by big companies. He happens to be working for one of the big boys and he felt that his company was not interested in being a Big Brother. They just wanted to compete in the web environment.

This was an absolutely fair reply to my paranoia. Possibly one always feels that big companies have the power, and the clout to be able to slap away the irritating buzz of industry watchdogs. Usually they even people the watchdog committees.

Observing what Microsoft got up to in terms of the browser software and the question arises whether they were justified in bundling a browser with the operating system thus effectively killing off the Netscape browser. They had the clout to kill all competition, which they almost did in the browser category and most definitely in the Windows operating system.

Does one count this as survival of the fittest or indecent business practices. The answer is probably whether one has shares in Microsoft or works for them, or not. It does open the can of worms though as to what big companies get up to. If large companies effectively can kill off competition, by whatever means they deem fit, then what ethical consideration is stopping them from snooping in the lives of ordinary citizens if that is what they deem will give them the best market share, or the highest profits.

What has brought on this whole philosophical discourse on big companies you might ask. It was an article on Google. It has been confirmed by Google that they have bought GrandCentral. This company unifies all existing phone services utilized by a user. GrandCentral ties together existing phone lines, numbers and voice mail boxes so that customers can manage all communications from one number and one inbox. It also has a customizable Web interface that lends control over how others may contact the user.

Now that seems fairly harmless doesn’t it. However, if one takes it one step further, one needs to remember that Google judges the suitability of acquisitions by one criteria really. Will the acquisition provide us, Google, with more personal information on what web users are doing and what they are interested in.

Google maintains that the more they know about the web user, the better they are able to provide customised and accurate search results to individuals. Google wants to be able to customise the users’ search results according to habits, opinions, interests and previous searches etc. Lets add to that, who and how they phoned people, which starts taking the search beyond the web. Brrr, Intrusive. Hello Big Brother.