Did Government Kill the Google Reader?

Felix "The Cat Fish" Salmon has a well worth reading discussion on Google's killing of it RSS service, Google Reader.

What stuck out in his post was this:

On Tuesday, Google paid $7 million to settle charges with a coalition of 38 states in relation to its privacy breaches. The 14-page agreement is pretty detailed, and includes promises from Google to spend a substantial amount of effort educating the public about the importance of securing wifi networks. (Which gives me a sad: I love unsecured wifi networks, and have yet to find any empirical data supporting the thesis that they cause real damage.)

On Wednesday, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Reader.

I’m not saying that the second event was directly caused by the first, but the two are linked. As the NYT explains today, the settlement is no less than an attempt to change the very culture of Google, to make it less freewheelingly Silicon Valley and more of a mature and responsible corporate giant.

Google Reader was a part of that freewheeling culture[...]

Governments love gathering data themselves, but they’re less excited when a private, for-profit company does it — and often does it better than they themselves can do it.

The full post is here.