See also de-facto monopoly power over navigation on the Internet, which they can (and do) use to ban sites from being accessible for any reason they feel like. I think the overwhelming perception is that "Oh, that only happens to black hat SEOs" and this is true right about until it happens to your site. At that point, welcome to Kafka.

(It says something that every time I criticize Google publicly I get a little scared because I know that flipping a bit in the Googleplex would cause my business to fold like an origami crane. Granted, they probably wouldn't play favorites with a site as small as mine. Probably.)

I trust the cops but I'm a big fan of having an adversarial process in place which reflexively distrusts them, because should the cops decide you're guilty for reasons fair or foul, the deck is otherwise incredibly stacked against you. I feel the same way about Google: they're a wonderful company, they've done more to improve the human experience than probably any other company in the last twenty years, and I assume every word out of their mouth is a lie until presented with evidence to the contrary. Note that if you do this you'll quickly clue onto the fact that aside from the meaningless PR about openness and self-righteousness about "evil" they are a ridiculously non-transparent company.

This is absolutely true. I have been bitten by their arrogance and poor customer service as a Google Checkout client in the past (they revoked our account without warning -- it was a legally-licensed private school fundraising car raffle -- and without explanation or recourse).

I wrote more about their arrogance here: http://alanhogan.com/arrogance-of-google

I find it more funny that pretty much every post complaining about this over the weekend repeated the same thing over and over again. Which essentially boiled down to what Google should do to solve the problem.

Well, sure. They caused the problem.

The answer for users is "don't trust Google with your information, and get as much of it out of Google's control as you can, even though you don't know how much there is and can't take some of it back."

But we knew that already. The question is "when will Google stop unethically publicizing all the information we don't forcibly remove from their control?"