During a Q&A following a rambling conclusion to Google I/O's marathon keynote, Google CEO Larry Page said a few things that hinted at his frustrations with the one platform he can’t seem to find the right interfaces for: government. The Man is killing Page’s buzz and keeping him from finding the answers to the world’s biggest problems.

If only Congress, the White House, and the FCC could just see things his way, he seemed to posit, all of the inefficiencies of regulation and privacy laws and the fear and loathing that come with them would simply disappear. If people would just be more trusting of technology and let Google know everything about them, government and health care and commerce would be immensely more efficient.

But Washington doesn’t seem to be aligning with Page’s desires. So he’s turning to the Google developer community to help him try to push Congress closer to his worldview—a worldview that may be better suited to Burning Man than Washington, DC.

What’s good for Larry Page is... good for America?

Page shared some of his vision for a techno-libertarian utopia that day. He expressed a desire for there to be “places where we can experiment, sort of like Burning Man” (but permanent), where people can come to try new ideas without the interference of pesky things like spectrum licenses, government regulators, and an unyielding Congress.

Then he touched on privacy and how it impairs Google from helping more in the field of medical research. “Why are people so focused on keeping their medical history private?” Page asked. His answer: because they were afraid insurance companies wouldn’t cover them as a result.

If there was just a law keeping insurance companies from denying coverage based on medical history, health record privacy wouldn’t be such a big deal, he suggested. We could all stop worrying, love total data transparency, and post our medical test results via Google+.

There’s no doubt that some government regulations on data privacy and security are as over-engineered and over-specified as a Defense Department-approved secure cell phone. I’m sure that in an ideal world, we could all learn to get along and not be evil with wireless spectrum. And it’s possible that the only people who don’t want the patent system reformed are patent trolls and lawyers.

But there’s more to debate over issues like health care data and immigration and consumer privacy than people not “getting it.” And I’m not sure anyone would really be happy in a world that’s a mash-up of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom—except maybe Larry Page and the tech startup execs who want to emulate him.

Million-coder march

In a later Google I/O session entitled “Beyond SOPA: What You Can Do to Influence Tech Policy,” a panel populated with tech-friendly political advocates tried to explain to an audience of developers how to change the political and bureaucratic processes. These are the entities that keep yielding the sorts of regulations that make Larry Page sad. The speakers essentially said government can be hacked—through long-term involvement and engagement with lawmakers and by exposing bureaucrats to the transformative powers of lean, efficient software development.

“SOPA really changed a lot of things for us,” said Mike McGeary, the co-founder and chief political strategist for Engine Advocacy. “It was the first time people sat up and said, ‘This can affect our business.’”

Engine Advocacy is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that puts tech startups in touch with people in government. The organization hopes that people in government will get the message on issues startups care about, like keeping the Internet unfettered and allowing for easier immigration for engineers. “If you have a two-person company, I promise you, your third hire is not going to be a government relations person,” McGeary said.

Jen Pahlka, the founder and director of Code for America, tries to connect coders with government on the other end of the process, bringing them together with agencies that are in the position of having to implement policy. “The first interface you’re offered as a citizen is to vote. Then you find other ways to advocate.”

Code for America’s other method is to put coders to work to help underfunded agencies implement policies in a way that doesn’t suck. In the process, she says, the goal is to get bureaucrats exposed to the possibilities of technology and lean startup approaches to problem solving. “Bureaucracy is an operating system,” she said. And by interacting with it, she suggested, developers could hack its interfaces and make government as a whole more sympathetic to the needs of tech entrepreneurs.

The scheduling of the “After SOPA” session on the first day of Google’s flagship event was no accident. It’s a hint at the wheels turning in Page's mind. He wants to enlist the broader Google community to join him in a virtual million coder march on government, a political grassroots crowdsourcing of tech-libertarians pressing an agenda to bring America closer to his vision. Larry Page wants tech entrepreneur utopia, and he wants to make it easier for Google to make a difference—and a profit.

Google’s interface problem

There’s little reason to be concerned about a future LarryWorld at the moment. While Google is rapidly iterating its beta versions of the Government Remote Control Interface, the company is still trying to get a handle on what’s inside the black box we call Congress. Google’s leadership was politically tone-deaf early in the game. In 2008, Sergey Brin showed up in jeans and sneakers to lobby senators over network neutrality. He could find only a few willing to talk to him—none of them particularly influential.

Google has tried to hone its government hacking skills, spending an exponentially expanding amount of treasure on lobbying. In 2012, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets, Google spent $18,220,000 on campaign contributions and lobbying. That includes money spent directly and through 24 lobbyist firms from both sides of the political divide, including the Podesta Group and former Senator Dick Gephardt’s Gephardt Group on the left and Crossroad Strategies (who advised the campaign of Mitt Romney) on the right.

A lot of that money was spent to lobby against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). But those dollars also tried to influence the various versions of cybersecurity legislation that have been launched in the past few years. Other big sinkholes for Google’s lobbying dollars included issues clustered around spectrum availability, “competition issues," and getting more H1B visas for engineers.

But all that lobbying had a limited impact on moving things Google’s way on issues like immigration reform and patent reform. There are two simple reasons for that: Google and the tech sector have failed to convince enough people that the things important to Google are important to them, and Google is being outspent in Washington by corporations and organizations hostile to Google's agenda (such as the telecom industry, the entertainment industry, and labor groups fighting H1B expansion). The TV, film, and recording industry collectively spent about $117 million in 2012. AT&T alone spent $24 million.

The changes Page wants require more than money. They require a change of culture, both political and national. The massively optimistic view that technology can solve all of what ails America—and the accompanying ideas on immigration, patent reform, and privacy—are not going to be so easy to force into the brains of the masses.

The biggest reason is trust. Most people trust the government because it's the government—a 226-year old institution that behaves relatively predictably, remains accountable to its citizens, and is governed by source code (the Constitution) that is hard to change. Google, on the other hand, is a 15-year old institution that is constantly shifting in nature, is accountable to its stockholders, and is governed by source code that is updated daily. You can call your Congressman and watch what happens in Washington on C-SPAN every day. Google is, to most people, a black box that turns searches and personal data into cash.

Before the IT industry can even begin to get headway toward anything like Page's view of a more hackable world, it has to overcome the issue of trust. There's a big difference between creating a brand that consumers "trust" and getting past the emotional and ideological baggage surrounding issues like immigration, privacy, and corporate power. So while organizations like Code for America try to show government how to do more with less, maybe Page and Google should invest less in lobbying government and more in educating the people who elect it.