In desiring so aggressively to create ‘one beautifully simple and intuitive experience,’ Google, like every other technology company, is now emulating Apple. What Apple has done more effectively than any other company is to leverage its brand, and the limited range of what it has on offer, to force its users to behave in certain ways beneficial to it.

Technology companies used to emulate IBM – Microsoft emulated IBM and Google emulated Microsoft – by commoditising the complement: IBM made it cheap and easy to get parts to plug into your computer, allowing it to sell more computers; Microsoft made it cheap and easy to buy computers, allowing it to sell more software; Google made it free and easy to do anything on the internet, allowing it to sell more ads. (Apple made it cheap and easy to get music online, which led to everyone buying iPods, and to 30 per cent of all music sales going through Apple.)

Google’s new business tactics are creatively inelegant, and insupportable to geeks: many of the things friendly to the open internet that Google could have done, and was in the process of doing, have been abandoned for ever. Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Twitter have changed in the same direction, appropriating whatever they can – apps, music, movies, books – to turn themselves into the only internet you’ll ever need. One day they’ll all be competing and incompatible ecosystems: you’ll have to choose which of the world wide webs to be in, pretty much exclusively, even though they will all be essentially indistinguishable.