Sure, but I don't find the social critique very useful either.
There are things that Google does, as a corporation, that you can find fault with, technological decisions that may or may not have been influenced by business model. For those, fire away. But the attack on SPDY/HTTP/2.0 because "Google is an advertising company" (which if you actually worked at Google, and knew how people made decisions here, you'd know is ridiculous from an intent or motivation point of view) is just pure mudslinging.
Examples of stuff that I, as a Google employee, would criticize Google for: Real Names, building "siloed" services and moving away federated/decentralized approaches (see my essay here: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...), most of what Yegge said about APIs, Google Hangouts going "silo" and away from XMPP model, etc.
People who work on ads and take their marching orders from ads are a small portion of employees at Google. The guys working on Chromium/Blink/SPDY do not report to ads, do not take orders from ads, and in general, work on technology without reference to monetization strategy. Their day to day job is to improve technology, with the hope that if you raise the tide, all boats will be lifted, and they'll be some ROI from that.
But that the idea that engineers are taking marching orders from shareholders to maximize profits based on ads by tweaking web standards is hilariously wrong for people working on Chrome.
I'm not talking about "Larry And Sergey have decreed that Evil Shall Happen!" I'm talking about broad economic incentives. Since I don't work for Google, I have to treat them as a black box; I see what goes in, I see what comes out. I know nothing of the internals, I only have one friend who actually works there. If I implied there was some kind of conspiracy, that is my fault. You're right that that would be ridiculous.
I would also criticize Google for your reasons, and they may be even more important. But this isn't a thread about those things.
A reasonable argument would say that we don't need the social and political stuff in standards discussions, which should be based instead on engineering.
Absolutely. This is why I wouldn't make these comments on the IETF mailing list. I do think that HN is an appropriate venue, this is very much a social place.
"Should we be doing this?" and "How should we do this?" are two very different questions.
