I think you misunderstand the reality. It’s not about a small group of developers figuring things out. In a medium run, Google has the resources to close those back doors. The question is whether we can as a larger community create something strong enough to survive, or force regulators to issue another antitrust injunction.

I think there is potential for the latter, bearing in mind that Google has lost multiple antitrust lawsuits in the last few years. Clearly Google is only using this as a tool to restrict competition, and it’s quite possible that courts will agree with my opinion. My view is that the AI bubble is a problem for their corporation, because they need to force it on people, but a lot of people don’t want it. The reality is that cell phones today already do almost everything we would want cell phones to do. Except that most of us want better ad blocking and anti-spam features, which would cut into Google’s bottom line. They know that they’re trying to push things on us that we don’t want, and if we have easy alternatives, they will lose business on a massive scale.