In case you didn’t hear about the Google marketing executive kidnapped by Egypt for his Facebook page: In the midst of the most intense protests, Google put out word that one of its employees was missing. He’d remain incommunicado for nearly two weeks, captured by the police and the military. And he would emerge as the hero of the protest movement. (If you know all about him, feel free to skip to the third graf, or see some good video interviews with him here.)

It all started because Ghonim—who was arrested on January 28th and secretly detained until February 7—founded a Facebook page to honor a 28-year-old from Alexandria, who, six months ago, was pulled out of an Internet café and beaten to death by police who suspected him of releasing videos of police corruption online. What started as a campaign against police brutality quickly grew into perhaps the largest single place young Egyptians ever had for sharing their frustrations over the abuses of the Mubarak regime. The “We Are All Khaled Said” page became a veritable community; many of its most active participants were human rights activists and dissident bloggers, many of whom knew each other and had been organizing against Mubarak’s policies for years. Some had faced jail time for their activities. But they weren’t scared. Ghonim even once challenged Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s vice-president, and the new president (and apparently ’CIA’s man in Cairo’): “Kidnap me, kidnap all my colleagues! Put us in jail! Kill us! Do whatever you want to do. We are getting back our country. You guys have been ruining this country for 30 years. Enough! Enough! Enough!” They heard the first part. They didn’t pick apart the implications of the rest.

It’s safe to say that besides all the TV and publishing requests, Ghonim just got a bunch of job offers that aren’t in marketing. But he says he’s not interested in politics; he’s sticking with Google. In his 60 Minutes interview, here, Ghonim – a marketer to the last – praises his company’s PR arm for its efforts in getting him out. Which must have made Google’s executives happy, even if everyone from the CEO to shareholders couldn’t have been terribly happy to learn that one of their employees was a de facto revolutionary leader (and using Facebook, no less!). You can’t expand into new countries if you’re perceived to be working against those countries’ interests.

All of which makes me think of the flirtations between Twitter and the U.S. Government last year and the battle between Google and the Chinese government (in which the State Department was ultimately ensnared). And it all makes me wonder: what happens when a giant technology company becomes a forceful non-state actor? What will the implications be for the apparent winners and losers? Whose interests is a multinational corporation serving in a process that, one hopes, is governed by democratic principles.

Of course, one’s hopes often don’t matter much in the realpolitik of diplomatic negotiations (cf Wikileaks cables) or revolutions (cf most of them). Nor do they matter in the politics of the Internet, dominated now by the question of who should have what kind of control over what sort of network (cf the net neutrality debate). It’s a question that is now tied up with global politics: not how much Netflix should have to pay to stream video but what happens when people aren’t able to get on the internet at all.

The implications aren’t clear, and that’s the problem: the increasingly twisted nature of the links between larger-than-ever corporations and governments ever eager to control information are obscuring the mechanisms by which these relationships effect politics, statecraft, and access. The case of Yahoo in China or Siemens in Iran offer just two chilling examples.

You don’t have to be a technophile to recognize the impact of the Internet on the information controllers of bad governments. The adulation and Likes that Google and Facebook and Twitter are getting may be erasing years’ worth of bad publicity, and maybe could lead to more semi-serious Nobel prize mentions for those companies’ founders. In the CNN interview here, Ghonim says he wants to meet Mark Zuckerberg to thank him for Facebook.

But the seduction of new technology and the publicity engines of large companies can make it hard to think hard about their effects (to say nothing about the effect those technologies may have on our attention spans). We – along with those Wikileaks admirers who think the days of secrecy in geo-politics are somehow numbered – must remember a lesson from Egypt: the Internet was instrumental in rallying people to Tahir Square, but it also became the government’s most powerful weapon. We get the double-edged sword argument, most vocally made by Evgeny Morozov: a digital space that a dissident uses to network with others can be a disruptive organizational tool; if control or access falls into the wrong hands, it can easily become a liability to the entire network. Google has been here before, in China, and we can be sure the company and others will be party to this most complex of geopolitical phenomena again.

That both the Egyptian government and the protesters were pricked by the sword in more than a few unexpected ways reflects just how much we all have to learn about all of the effects of our most exciting technologies.

Also see the Cairo Motherboard