"a company you can trust to manage these things for you"
"automatically segregated into its own vlan"
Aren't these goals fundamentally at odds? I would imagine that Joe consumer (if they care at all about any of this) would be rather more inclined to entrust the role of orchestrating/segregating their home network devices to an entity like Google than to some random startup.
the average person doesn't even know what these things are, which is partially why there is a market opportunity here. what they know is that companies like google and facebook are not entirely trustworthy but they have no alternative. it's hopelss, until an entity comes along and gives them some hope in the form of an alternative. basically all of the things we talk about around preserving privacy and security on the internet need to be built into our devices, and companies like google actively oppose such limitations of their reach into our lives.
You're getting into Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" territory here.
When you lose trust you end up with your crazy uncle leaving Fox News for Alex Jones and YouTube. You have people becoming QAnon followers.
I say this not to make a political point, but that the problem is fundamentally hopeless and I see no way out. You end up landing on one side of the fence or the other. You either just don't think about it and continue to use Google and Facebook and remain ignorant of the problem, or you spiral down the never-ending hole of despair.
We have seen articles recently that tell us not even Signal can be fully trusted. Whether or not it's true is beside the point. The point is, not even the HN crowd is safe from the cliff of paranoia. The seed of doubt has been planted.
Is someone going to trust a small tech startup in 2021? No, not like they would have in 1997. The market for trust has effectively been sealed off today. Because, paradoxically, the Googles and Facebooks ruined it all. They stripped us (all of us, not just HN) of our innocence and naivety. We know not to trust Google, but they are also a known known. A small tech company is a total unknown. We're familiar with how Google is going to bend us over. So if someone is going to do us dirty, it may as well be a known entity. Or... you go and build a cabin in the woods and start writing manifestos.
There are very mundane reasons that you may want to own the software stack your data depends on that aren't 'I don't trust Google/Facebook/Microsoft/The Reptilians.'
The most prominent of which is "What happens when they drop support for my use case/lock me out of my account?"
Unfortunately, the cost of running your own one-off solution is rather high. And doubly unfortunately, while I would pay money for a box that I could plug into my computer that provided all of these services, I wouldn't pay enough money to justify someone building it, and selling it to me.
while i agree google and facebook have certainly peed in the pool, that strikes me as overly cynical, simply through recognizing that only a fringe few actually radicalize or become helplessly paranoid in that way in practice.
most people, whether they rationalize it or not, are cognizant that we live in the grey gradient of trust for various companies and brands. the vector field is all sorts of wacky and inscrutible, but maybe we can point a few of those vectors in the right direction and some folks will happily slide down it to better (but perhaps not perfect) safety and privacy.
"automatically segregated into its own vlan"
Aren't these goals fundamentally at odds? I would imagine that Joe consumer (if they care at all about any of this) would be rather more inclined to entrust the role of orchestrating/segregating their home network devices to an entity like Google than to some random startup.