A lot of people seem to be wildly misinterpreting the Google Secure Access initiative that I wrote about this morning.

Despite Om Malik's high-profile (and if you ask me, ridiculous) prediction of a few weeks ago, Google is NOT getting into the "business" of providing free wifi to everyone. Reuters & co. seem to have seen "Google" and "wifi" within a sentence of each other and not bothered to read any further. But Google isn't becoming an ISP — they're just offering a free VPN.

Why are they doing this? For the same reason they offer GMail and the Google Web Accelerator: to drive more of your personal web traffic through their servers. They can then analyze it (check the terms of service!) in order to better profile you, which in turn allows them to better target you for ads, which in turn lets them make more money.

It's a pretty straightforward model, and it makes sense. It's basically a glorified version of your supermarket's discount card program. And yes, I think those are a nasty, evil mechanism with the potential to violate privacy, discriminate against the poor, and (most likely) steal your thoughts via secret government satellites. Google's no different from these other privacy brokers, and eventually their shareholders are going to start complaining that the company's "Don't Be Evil" motto puts them at a competitive disadvantage. For now, though, the consumer gets a lot in return for surrendering their privacy.

Still — what if tomorrow Google started selling public access to GMail users' email for a buck an hour in a "best of Craigslist" sort of setup? What would you do? How would you get your messages out of their system? I don't have good answers to these questions, and it makes me uneasy. Relying on the continued benevolence of a company — particularly a publicly-traded one — is not a position in which any of us should want to be.

UPDATE: And yes, I realize that running a free ISP would be a great way to capture users' traffic. But others have tried it and failed — usually while actually placing additional ads in front of the user (ala NetZero). That's far more profitable than simply showing better ads. It's true that running a wifi ISP would be cheaper than the dialups that failed. And I wouldn't be surprised to see Google partner with a business to provide free wifi, or perhaps get involved in a municipal project or two. But the sort of vast wireless GoogleNet that Malik posits seems very unlikely to me.

UPDATE 2: I should point out that the Craigslist example is probably unrealistic. As noted in section 5 here, you retain the copyright to your emails. The point is just meant to be general: Google is in a position to do a number of evil things, should they decide to.