Google's "Do No Evil" mantra has been nothing more than an evil subversive marketing ploy since the day they first wrote it down. Of course Google does evil and plenty of it.

...when the writer feels the need to say, "Google shoves bids through.." rather than, "Google puts bids through..."

Using loaded, emotional terms makes it look like you've got an axe to grind. Report on the situation itself, rather than giving us vive-la-revolution rhetoric, and I'll trust the source more.

Google sells advertising, not search results. Those are free, as are dozens of other services. Therefore, they are perfectly withing their rights to sell that advertising space to whomever they please. But people think they're too good to be true, and inevitably bash them every chance they get.

What "evil" has Google done? I don't see it.

In about 8 years of using google as my main search engine I don't remember clicking once on google ads on any page, except a few sympathy clicks for websites I like with little intention of looking at the contents. Sites such as Kelkoo, Amazon, dabs, and eBay get 99% of my online buying.

I guess Google must work on the spam principle. But really who are these people who click on them?!

To me seeing articles like this sit right up there with the stories circulating a while back about the nut job Danny Carlton, the one complaining that using ad blocking software was taking food out of the mouths of honest web developers and their children. like AC above said, who exactly is seeing these ads? anyone with half a brain is using firefox + adblock plus + customize google and as a result are seeing exactly zero web adverts while using any google page or service, or any other web page for that matter.

The amusing part of the whole Danny Carlton saga was the little redirect script he wrote to push adblock plus users away from his content, so clever he was, except for the fact that most people smart enough to use adblock plus are also using noscript, which blocked his little fuck you script at the source and failed to redirect the masses of firefox users like me when went to his site to what all the fuss was about. too funny...

For the last umpteen years the strictly limited attention I have been able to spend opposing evil monopolies has been directed against another evil empire, and not the one that employs open-source programmers.

IBM was version 1. Journalists loved Microsoft Abuse of Monopoly 2.0 because it meant they could all use the same computing platform and they didn't have to learn much about computers in order to do so. It wasn't as if Microsoft was manipulating their industry. But it was and still does manipulate the industry of El Reg. readers.

So in what sense does Google Abuse of Monopoly 3.0 adversely affect the interests of programmers and IT technologists ? In one sense the fact that something similar comes along to manipulate the interests of those who have some part to play in forming wider opinion about the undesirability of evil monopolies in general has to be welcome. The one way journalists might be able to broaden any kind of coalition here would be by campaigning for all evil monopolies alike to be made to release source code to algorithms giving unfair monopoly status under open-source licensing.