Although all companies go through litigation, this is starting to feel more and more like the same process Microsoft went through with IE - core business, varied legal action at state, federal, and international level, and business practices that can be painted as suspect, with lots of small business owners that can be put into the press as victims. Add into that a press-worth corporate tagline of "Do no evil", and this will, over time, get a fair amount of attention.

Could this be the Achilles heel for Google? The Microsoft lawsuit was a huge drain of both cash, brand, an intellectual capital from the company. It will be interesting to see if this series of litigation has a similar effect.

Good point about drain of intellectual capital -- legal issues could well be a turn-off for new talent, too. Do engineers still see Google as a cool place to work? Microsoft lost the cool factor ages ago.

This could get ugly...who knows. So much time may go by and we will forget about it, like Panda, and a new story will pop up then we will reference back to this... the line will never be linear.

This just seems like a article written to be confusing and take quotes out of context, even matt cutts head of google web spam said this whole article is false.

I wonder how this is going to play out?

And can the govvies even understand what they're doing, tech wise?