I'm not convinced:

The 'open internet' is often just a reverse walled garden. Things used to be locked down on your device, now they are locked down on remote servers where you couldn't even pry them out if you tried hard & ignored the law. (Unless you're the US government, in that case things have gotten much easier.)

The only advantage is that there is no middle-man between you and using any app (website) you want. But no company has ever tried to restrict web access on its devices, so where's the advantage?

And judging Google by its products: Google+ actually seems a lot more closed to me than Facebook (hardly any API?). Android itself is open source, but it is hardly about pushing the open web either. (At least it stopped pushing Flash)

While I don't entirely disagree with your point about the "open internet" being another kind of walled garden, there are definitely companies and organisations that have taken steps to ensure that the open web is actually "open," and Google is one of them. Evidence: https://www.google.com/takeout, which lets you export data from almost all of your Google services.

Some major innovations from Android have inspired sister projects for the open web, like http://webintents.org/

Also, I think you're misinterpreting the term "open internet" ; it usually means "open" for the developer, not the user. However, it's still better for users, as competition between open standards and technologies means that they usually get the best solutions (exceptions being things like h.264) This is certainly better than the classic walled garden where one company gets to decide what developers may or may not use.

In short, it's better because it's: - unfiltered (mature content, etc.) - unrestricted in terms of technologies used - partially open for users

takeout is not the same as interoperability. Google's new products have very weak interoperability (APIs to non-Google clients)

I don't know why people keep complaining that Google+ doesn't have an API https://developers.google.com/+/api/

It is readonly.

It's still an API, but it's incomplete.

Not necessarily, since it seems Google's new strategy is to create its own walled garden and keep you inside of it as much as possible.

I would say they are more like a funnel. And they are trying to make their funnel even bigger. They make their money by sending you to other websites and services, which is why most people don't consider them a walled garden.

Their search engine makes money that way.

Their mail and calendaring apps sure don't, for example.

At this point Google is big enough that generalizing about how they make money is a bit pointless, because they have a bunch of different revenue streams. The only commonality is advertising.

They have the open data policy allowing you to take your data with you. And this is what makes people less suspicious of them.

Sure. They're way better than many about vendor lock-in, because they do realize that it's somewhat evil. Not to mention often counterproductive.

But that's not stopping them from signing deals to get Chrome drive-by installed on users' computers, say. Again, it's a big place. Some of it is still all about "do no evil", while other parts seem to be run by scumbags. Pretty good for a large corporation, all things considered, but not exactly all wonderful.

How so? (genuine question - you don't make it clear what you're referring to)