How to anger the Internets: Just say ‘No'

When companies, regulators and governments sit down to figure out what flies with the Internet community, they should probably start by analyzing the effects of two simple concepts: “Yes, you can,” and “No, you can’t.”

Products and laws that succeed with the online community tend to have at their core the positive side of this opposing duality of permission. Netflix is a good example. The video streaming service has impressively signed up 23 million customers in only three years by telling people “Yes, you can” – in the form of availability and cost. Its convenient service can be used on just about every gadget at a price that many people have obviously found compelling.

Google is in rare company when it comes to this issue, since it has experienced both sides. For much of its relatively short history, the company has stressed “Yes, you can.” On the product side, Android and Chrome operating systems are free and largely open for application developers to fiddle with and improve. On the policy level, the company has also lobbied for more openness in telecommunications networks and for freer speech in places such as China. Google also continues to negotiate and sometimes struggle with the entertainment industry to maintain YouTube as a place where people can express themselves in creative ways.

Google has made its share of mistakes, though. When the company launched Google+ last year, it told participants “No, you can’t” by banning the use of pseudonyms on the social network. The online community vocally complained, saying that users’ needs to be anonymous sometimes trump the company’s desire to identify them for search and advertising purposes. Google learned its lesson and in January reversed its pseudonym policy.

For a company that generally doesn’t charge for services, brand is everything. Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet and Google’s “chief Internet evangelist” (he’s also a vice-president), says the Yes-you-can versus No-you-can’t dichotomy is therefore at the core of all the company’s decisions.


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