So this happened Monday: Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion. Cash, not stock, which is the kind of detail that makes a deal feel real instead of just corporate confetti. I've spent basically the whole week trying to figure out how I feel about it, because I have one of these things bolted to the wall in my hallway.
I bought my Nest back in October, mostly because my old thermostat was this beige Honeywell dial that looked like it had been installed during the Carter administration, and partly because I'm a sucker for anything with a mid-century-ish round shape and an app. It cost me $249, which felt like a lot of money for a thermostat until I remembered I've spent more than that on a video game console I use maybe twice a year.
And it's genuinely good. It learns your schedule, it's got that little leaf icon that shames you into being more efficient, the whole thing just works in a way most home hardware doesn't. Tony Fadell, the guy who ran the company, used to build iPods at Apple, and you can feel that pedigree in how the device is put together. It doesn't feel like it was designed by a thermostat company. It feels like it was designed by people who spent a decade thinking really hard about buttons and dials and what happens when you turn one.
But now it's Google's. And I keep circling back to the same dumb thought: this is a company that already knows what I search for at 2am, and now it's going to know when I'm actually home. Larry Page's blog post about the deal was full of the usual "we're thrilled" language, nothing about data, nothing about what happens to the temperature logs and occupancy patterns Nest has been quietly collecting since the day I plugged it in. Maybe nothing changes. Maybe it's totally fine. I just don't love finding out later.
Small tangent, not really related to any of this: my radiator in the back room still bangs like someone's trapped inside the wall every morning around 6am, and no amount of software is smart enough to fix that. Some problems are still just plumbing problems, no matter how many sensors you throw at them.
The other big thing this week, and I almost skipped writing about it because I figured half the blogs I read would cover it better than I could, is that a federal appeals court struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules on Tuesday. This was the Verizon case. The short version is the court decided the FCC doesn't actually have the authority to enforce the open internet rules the way it wrote them back in 2010, which is a pretty dry sentence for a genuinely not-dry problem. Nothing is technically stopping an ISP now from slowing down a competitor's traffic, or charging someone like Netflix extra just to not get throttled.
I don't think anyone should panic that Comcast flips a switch tomorrow and your Twitter starts loading at dial-up speeds. That's not how this plays out in practice, at least not right away. But it's the kind of ruling that matters more in five years than it does this week, and it's easy to shrug off precisely because the consequences are slow and mostly invisible until suddenly they aren't.
Between those two stories it's been a week that has me thinking about ownership in a broader sense than usual. Who owns the pipe your data runs through, and who owns the box on your wall that's deciding what to do with your data in the first place. I don't have a tidy conclusion here, and I'm not going to fake one. I still like my thermostat quite a bit. I still turned the heat down two degrees last night because that little leaf icon made me feel vaguely guilty about it, and I genuinely can't decide if that makes it a great product or a slightly unsettling one. Possibly both, at the same time, which is sort of where a lot of this stuff seems to be landing lately.