Uti­liz­ing a dif­fer­ent social net­work than Google+ will not solve the prob­lem which many peo­ple wish to address. Google’s pol­icy, and Google’s appar­ent desire to become an “iden­tity ser­vice,” will have a grow­ing impact on the Inter­net as a whole.

Let’s take pri­vacy and per­sonal safety off the table for the moment. If Google goes for­ward with inte­grat­ing Google+ pro­files with search, rank­ing sites up or down based on whether the site author has a Google+ pro­file or whether or not their pro­file is ver­i­fied, people’s real life income could be effected. Web traf­fic may very well be diverted away from rel­e­vant and trust­wor­thy sites sim­ply because the author does not have a Google+ account.  Google’s dom­i­nance in Search could allow Google to effec­tively hold search based traf­fic hostage, forc­ing those doing busi­ness online to cre­ate a Google+ pro­file, or lose web traf­fic related revenue.

And what of the peo­ple that have been using Google ser­vices under one pseu­do­nym or another for years that could sud­denly find them­selves with a Google Iden­tity Cri­sis because they are now required to have a Google Pro­file (now known as the Google+ pro­file), regard­less of whether they would have used Google+ at all? If Google is going to move for­ward with inte­gra­tion of Google+ into every Google branded ser­vice (as has been hinted at, if not stated out­right), wouldn’t that even­tu­ally be the case?  I imag­ine it would be a bit over­whelm­ing to seg­ment the TOS by indi­vid­ual Google ser­vice, not to men­tion very con­fus­ing for the aver­age user.

A great many of us have been using, pro­mot­ing, even evan­ge­liz­ing Google ser­vices for years. I myself have been doing so since Google Search first hit the scene. And after all this time, build­ing the brand with adver­tis­ing rev­enue gen­er­ated from search results full of pseu­do­ny­mous and anony­mous web­sites, Google tells us all to piss off.