It is dawning, at long last, on the major American technology companies that they are under attack – from their own government, not just from foreign powers and criminals. They'd already been co-opted by spies and law enforcement, forced to obey secret orders targeting their customers and users. Or, in some cases, they'd willingly collaborated with the government's mass surveillance schemes.

Now they are realizing that their own government considers them outright adversaries. They understand, especially in the wake of the Washington Post's report about western spy services hacking into the intra-corporate networks of internet giants Google and Yahoo, that no amount of cooperation will ever satisfy the people who wage a relentless campaign to spy on anything and everything that moves. (The NSA, of course, has issued a denial of sorts, but it's more of a non-denial denial of the Washington Post report).

For the users of cloud services and computing/communications technologies, the evidence mounts that we have to be skeptical (I would go as far as to say highly skeptical) of what the tech companies are telling us. We can appreciate their avowed good intentions, but they have created an architecture that obliges us to believe they may be selling us out at just about every opportunity, even if they are not.

For the companies themselves, a fairly stark choice is emerging: protect us, or risk losing us. If they chose the former, they will need to change the way they do business. Or they can lead a political movement to radically change societal norms and laws in ways that restrict collection of data and punish its misuse. Ideally, they should do both.

Changing the way they do business will be wrenching for some of them. The internet companies – cloud providers in particular – rely on a business model that obliges them to do to users what governments want to do to everyone: watch and store everything we do and say.

In a practical sense, here's what that means for Google. The company utterly relies on its ability to store vast amounts of data about how we all use the internet, including email, in plain text on its own servers. More than any large company in history, Google is about data-mining: extracting meaning and value from what we collectively do when we use its immense networks.

Google does offer more security than some other cloud-based services. Gmail is encrypted by default, so what you do when you're logged in is (probably) protected between your computer and Google's servers. The company is moving to encrypt everything moving from one server to another – to prevent the NSA, GCHQ and others from continuing to hack that data. But once the information arrives on Google's servers, it is decrypted so that Google can mine it for value.

To truly protect their users, Google and other tech companies would have to create a system that keep the information secret even from themselves. There would be a downside for the users, at least at first: We might lose some of the value that is created by the company's ability to learn from what we all do. Perhaps the tech industry could deploy a serious number of its high-paid engineers and designers to work on solutions that meet all of our needs.

If Google et al decided to make our security paramount, in an ecosystem where we users were no longer the product being sold, they'd have to ask us to pay for the services they provide. I would do so, gladly, if I could get an assurance of security. The reality, however, is that I can't imagine Google doing this, because the data collection and manipulation is so deep in the company's DNA.

I fear, in any case, that we've become so accustomed, even addicted, to the easy-to-use convenience of Google and its peers that not enough of us will opt for genuine safety. I hope the marketplace will come up with more products and services that are easy to use, robust in function and designed for security from the ground up; maybe the just-announced DarkMail will be part of the solution. I hope some nation (Iceland?) decides to offer genuine protections to companies that want to genuinely protect their customers.

This is not just a technical issue. It's about the DNA of our societies, too. And that's why I hope Google, the tech company I still trust the most, will launch one of its famous "moon shots" – mega-risky projects aimed at mega-change – in the cultural and political realms.

President Obama has said he wants a serious national conversation about surveillance and data, but his administration has done everything in its power to prevent that from happening. Some moves in Congress to tweak the current system are welcome but insufficient.

Google should take the lead in organizing a who's who of the technology industry to put some of its vast wealth to work in Washington and other national capitals, media, academic institutions and everywhere else that makes sense – to push for fundamental changes in the way we collect and use data, in order to protect us from ourselves and each other in a world where surveillance potential is increasingly embedded into everything we touch.

The tech companies could start by loudly and publicly – and financially – supporting Lavabit, a company that shut down rather than agree to obey a government order to screw its customers, in its legal appeals.

The tech industry seems to think it can win back our trust by quietly objecting to what it decides to call "overreach" and by lobbying behind the scenes. No, it can't, because there's no reason why we should believe a word of it, even if we want (as I do) to believe it.

We need talk, yes, that deep and essential conversation about our future. We we also need action. When the tech billionaires and the companies they control create the anti-surveillance, pro-security equivalent of the National Rifle Association – supporting pro-liberty candidates and targeting anti-liberty politicians for defeat – I'll start to believe they're serious about this.

Your move, Larry Page. Please, please make the right one.