Google has an incentive to be nice: they only make money and continue to exist if people use their products. If they suddenly take everyone's gmail address, the backlash would be incomprehensible. There would be Senate hearings and an infinite amount of Internet Hate.
But registrars are smaller and probably wouldn't face any financial consequences for stealing your domain name and selling it to someone with more money. You would be mad, but since it only affected you, there would be very little you could do. No hearings. No Internet outrage.
Alternatively, someone could sue you for your domain name, and you'd never be able to afford to mount a reasonable defense. Google, on the other hand, could afford to do that.
I think once a company gets to be Fortune 500 in size, they probably aren't going to do anything too drastic. It's the smaller ones that can be bought or do something unethical because they don't have shareholders or a board of directors. (Then again, that didn't stop Enron. But they fucked over their employees, not their customers.)
I assume that the chances for you being sued for your domain are much lower than the chances of Google randomly disabling your account. Which has happened in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354593 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798048 - seems that for some of the disabled Google+ account all other Google services have been disabled too. If the registrar steals your domain you would still have the possiblity to go to court to get it back. If Google disables your account you can't do that.
The highest (but still small) risk when having your own domain is that some company claims it has a trademark on the name. But you can mitigate this my (1) using your real name or some other nickname as the domainname and (2) using the .name namespace instead of .com.
I don't see what you're saying. Big Pharm sells drugs to insurance companies. Oracle sells databases to CTOs. Monsanto sells weed killers to farmers.
Yes, these activities all have externalities; drugs would be better if people could pay for them themselves, databases would be better if programmers picked them out, and farming would be better if Monsanto didn't patent genes. But ultimately, none of these companies try to harm their customers. We just don't like them because we aren't their customers.
Google is in a weird position where they have two sets of customers; users and advertisers. Both need to be pleased, even though their interests are in conflict, or Google will die. So there's a financial incentive to be nice to users, and as a user, that means they should be nice to you.
I disagree with this. Users are not customers, we are the product. Google need only be slightly better than the second best option. Now that they have such momentum in search I don't see any reason why they need to care about users, only advertisers.
Google does have a bidding system for ads, that's true, but if everyone stops using Google, then the ads become worthless and Google goes out of business.
It's easy to look at as "Google is just selling eyeballs", but it's not that simple; Google has to please both the advertisers and the people looking at the ads. And, of course, there are the various paid products (Earth Pro, Docs, etc.) that Google offers.
Google has an incentive to be nice: they only make money and continue to exist if people use their products. If they suddenly take everyone's gmail address, the backlash would be incomprehensible. There would be Senate hearings and an infinite amount of Internet Hate.
But registrars are smaller and probably wouldn't face any financial consequences for stealing your domain name and selling it to someone with more money. You would be mad, but since it only affected you, there would be very little you could do. No hearings. No Internet outrage.
Alternatively, someone could sue you for your domain name, and you'd never be able to afford to mount a reasonable defense. Google, on the other hand, could afford to do that.
I think once a company gets to be Fortune 500 in size, they probably aren't going to do anything too drastic. It's the smaller ones that can be bought or do something unethical because they don't have shareholders or a board of directors. (Then again, that didn't stop Enron. But they fucked over their employees, not their customers.)