Of course, but no other ISP is any better (at least that I know of) and THEY certainly don't offer gigabyte unlimited internet for 70$ a month.
Google being the lesser of all evils here, we can only hope that they will drive the market into a much better state and that if their priorities ever stop aligning with ours, something better will have emerged (just as Fiber is emerging to change the status quo now).
The problem is when google starts to target advertising based on your entire online life. For example, currently, google can't really see what you're unloading to dropbox or iCloud or emails you receive (outside of Gmail.) But if they're the ISP, they can start to target advertising based on the documents you upload or files you upload. The information they could collect would be mind-blowing. And you just know that part of their TOS will be "we can do whatever we want with your information."
I don't know if I want one company effectively owning the internet history of every user. If google is able to undercut other providers and they become the only high-quality game in town, then most users will have little choice but to submit to the google beast.
Internet connectivity should be considered a public utility. It shouldn't be subject to intrusive monitoring by the provider. Just like the phone company can't send you targeted adds based on the phone numbers you call, Google shouldn't be able to target ads based on your online activity (when outside the normal google product channels). Gmail isn't a public utility, an ISP is. Can you imagine: "Based on the fact that you uploaded photos of a baby's birthday party, we'd like to show you ads for baby toys." That's like the phone company interrupting your phone call to Paris to advertise airline tickets. Chinese ISPs already have highly intrusive advertising.. ads that effectively take over your browser regardless of what site you're visiting.
The only thing worse than a Google ISP would be a Facebook one.
I accept your premise but respectfully reject your conclusion. However, my stance might have a lot to do with the way I personally use the internet.
There's a few points here that I make sure I follow:
1. Whatever activity I have online is something that I don't care about others finding out about (similar to not uploading pictures to Facebook that I wouldn't want seen). This is the front page check: anything you wouldn't want on the newspaper cover, you don't do.
2. For things that I DON'T want known, I consider using anonymity tools such as TOR (I've never needed this thus far).
3. For sensitive data, I just don't store it on the internet. If I ABSOLUTELY need to do so, I use client side encryption, such as TrueCrypt. I would recommend doing that if you store sensitive or personal data in dropbox as your example suggests.
We also currently have nothing to suggest that Google will be monitoring the pipes (at least any more than any ISP), so one can assume that Google won't know about anything more than they do now.
Once you realize that most of the data you submit online is used, read and sold by the services you provide it to and accept that fact, you can start seeing your online identity as something precious you don't goof around with. For those reasons, I can't see Google getting any more intrusive in my life than it is now by controlling the pipe: they (or other corporations) already control most of the services I wilfully submit my data to.
At this point, I stop seeing those services (Google, Facebook, etc) as free and instead treat them with caution, while understanding that I pay them in data instead of money. And honestly, I'm kind of fine with this because I use them carefully.
>For example, currently, google can't really see what you're unloading to dropbox or iCloud or emails you receive (outside of Gmail.) But if they're the ISP, they can start to target advertising based on the documents you upload or files you upload.
Note that the privacy policy says they don't (http://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html), that you have laws that protect you (like the Cable Communications Policy Act -- though not enough), and that both dropbox and icloud traffic (and hopefully messages from your email server) are sent over encrypted connections anyway.
I agree with you that internet connectivity should be considered a public utility by now, but your post has almost nothing to do with google and everything to do with connecting to the internet through any third party.
Google being the lesser of all evils here, we can only hope that they will drive the market into a much better state and that if their priorities ever stop aligning with ours, something better will have emerged (just as Fiber is emerging to change the status quo now).