As the dust begins to settle on Google’s latest and least-tentative step towards an overarching social infrastructure, it’s becoming overwhelmingly apparent that Google+ is a Good Thing. At its most basic, Google+ is an alternative in a space that is fast becoming a one-party state. With 750 million users, exponential activity growth, the most-proliferated “Like” button, and one of the most popular federated login system in the world (Facebook Connect), it’s fair to say that Facebook’s grip on the web is monopolistic — and Google+ offers us a viable and safe alternative.

With Google+ in the open, and with tech pundits lathering Circles and Hangouts with the highest of honorifics, Facebook finally needs to watch its step — and its back. Except for Microsoft, which already owns a share in Facebook, Google is the only web property which can even begin to threaten Facebook’s supremacy. Facebook has had a far from faultless infancy, but because of its complete dominion of the web, the repercussions from its numerous faux pas have been almost nonexistent. That’s the problem with monopolies, and the reason they’re illegal: if you have nowhere to go — if there isn’t an alternative service that you can switch to — the monopoly can simply milk you and stretch you without recourse. But now there’s Google+. With Big G hulking menacingly in Facebook’s shadow and just waiting for a misstep or mistake, Facebook needs to be careful. Mess up now, Zuckerberg, and Google will gladly gobble up droves of discontented denizens.

The problem with this rationale, however rosy it may seem, is that you’re simply moving from one internet juggernaut to another. You’re taking your chips from Facebook and investing them in Google+. This might be a satisfactory solution in the short term, but do you have any rational reason to believe that it’s better in the long term? Is Google a nicer company than Facebook? Google’s record with privacy-related issues (Buzz, Street View, Wi-Fi snooping) is just as bad as Facebook’s, if not worse, and it remains under investigation by governments around the world. Google+ certainly shows that Google has learnt from its mistakes — but just remember that Google makes its money by selling you; by knowing where you live, what videos you like watching, and your entire search and surfing history, Google sells targeted advertising to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Selling you is 96% of Google’s revenue stream.

Six of one…

By moving to Google+, you are simply switching pimps from Facebook to Google — and when you stop to think about it, that might not be a very good idea. Let me show you a sad story from last week, where Google made 10-year-old Alex cry by banning him from Gmail. In short, Alex got invited to Google+ — and to join Google+ you must create a Google Profile. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) Alex gave his real age — and voila, the next time he tried to log into Gmail, his account had been blocked for breaking Google’s terms of service. Google, by law, and just like almost every website in the US, cannot easily offer its services to people under the age of 13.

Now, this isn’t necessarily wrong of Google — it’s just following the law, after all — but it perfectly illustrates a far larger and more pressing issue: Alex lost his Gmail account, his contacts list, and every email he’s ever sent or received, because he updated his Google Profile. These are two services that are only tenuously linked by the Google Taskbar, yet inexorably linked by the Google umbrella. Your entire Google account — the name and password that logs you into as disparate services as YouTube, Docs, Picasa, and Google+ — is governed by a master terms of service, and by additional terms defined by each individual service. If you break the master ToS on YouTube, you can lose access to Picasa; if you do something silly in Google+, you can lose access to your Docs.

Half dozen of the other…

Hopefully you’re beginning to see the problem of putting all of your eggs in the Google basket. It gets worse though, I’m afraid: the Google+ user content and conduct policy is dangerously restrictive. First of all, it leads with an incredibly vague policy about illegal activities: “Do not use our products to engage in illegal activities or promote dangerous and illegal acts.” What does Google consider illegal? Are links to The Pirate Bay illegal — or just direct links to torrents? What if I have friends that live in an embargoed country, and I link to a piece of software that US law prohibits them from downloading? Which government’s definition of “illegal” are we using, anyway?

It goes on: if you post any nudity or sexually explicit content on Google+, or even set your profile picture to a “close-up of a person’s buttocks”, your Google account can be suspended. Furthermore, as Violet Blue (NSFW) points out, Google+ uses Picasa for its photo albums — and Picasa has a zero tolerance policy for nudity and borderline content. In other words, you might want to think twice before posting photos of your salacious barroom and clubbing antics on Google+. Unlike Flickr, which allows nudity but requires you to label your uploads as “mature” to prevent accidental viewing, Google+ and Picasa lack any kind of user-administered controls — you either keep your content clean, or host your images elsewhere.

Like the 13-year-old thing, this is still fairly sensible stuff from Google — but how long will it be until some unfortunate Facebook convert trips over the barbed wire and posts a drunken photo of his mooning buttocks? Or perhaps a link to an art exhibition featuring a nude sculpture or painting? He will swiftly find himself without access to his email, documents, videos, blogs, and more. Google is notoriously bad at handling terms of service violations, too — there’s no telephone number that you can call to contest your suspension, and email support usually takes days, usually resulting in a succinct but useless boilerplate response.

All of your eggs in one basket

Now, think about it: do you really want to get all of your Google services mixed up with your social network? There’s the inherent privacy concerns, of course — and a successful social network is the only thing missing from Google’s targeted advertising crown — but ultimately, it’s a matter of whether you want to bequeath your entire internet experience to Google. If you think that Facebook has a monopoly in the social scene, just imagine for a second what your life on the web would be like if you switched to Google+: You would open your browser — Chrome — and search using Google. You would share content and keep up with friends using Google+ Circles and +1. You would consume and create content on YouTube and Picasa and Blogger. You would talk to your friends with Voice and Google+ Hangouts. You would plan your trips using Maps and Earth and Docs — and of course, Gmail would be there, underpinning it all. Every single step of the way you will be followed by tracking cookies and behavior monitors and targeted advertising.

Effectively, it will be AOL 3.0 all over again. You might be using a normal web browser this time, and it might look like you’re free to roam across the beautiful, bountiful expanses of the internet, but ultimately you’ll be playing in Google’s walled garden. You can step outside for brief periods, of course — Google doesn’t know everything, at least not yet — but never without Google’s knowledge, and never beyond the tenacious, tentacular reaches of Big G’s tracking cookies.

Before you jump ship to Google+, remember this: Facebook might not be perfect, but at least you can sign out. Do you really want to log in and then spend an eternity in the World Wide Google Web?

[Image credit: Mrs Logic]