Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme

Google owes its existence to the open web, but today, its technological “innovations” have much to do with locking users into a “walled garden.” The latest of these is “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification,” an experimental initiative that will let companies block users if they are running independent, "de-googled" versions of Android. These “indie Android” versions are favored by people who want to protect their privacy and their attention by blocking trackers and ads. Worse, this is just the latest in a line of similarly user-hostile measures. 

Long before “agentic AI,” we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a “user agent.” Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent. 

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our “agents” that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers. 

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal. 

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's “dish partners?” What if your toaster refused to toast “unauthorized bread?” 

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made. 

But once a company owns the market—once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers—they can cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it. 

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases. This thrice-convicted monopolist paid Apple—more than $20b/year— to stay out of the search market: It cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for. It cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw. 

Google wasn't always this way. The “don't be evil” company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open