The trouble with item No. 6 in Google's philosophy, "You can make money without doing evil," is that it fails to define evil.
As a consequence, it invites every critic to rub Google's nose in other people's definitions of evil. Welcome to the marketplace of ideas.
It's hard to feel sorry for a company whose name has become a ubiquitous verb and whose balance sheet contains a pile of cash that exceeds the cumulative earnings of the U.S. airline industry since 1929. Therefore, we don't feel sorry for Google.
We do, however, hope that it weathers its storms better than some of its predecessors, because we just can't help noticing the parallels between the search business of 2011 and the GDS business of 30 years ago.
Back then, the airlines owned the GDSs: American owned Sabre, and United owned Apollo.
Their displays were, in the eyes of competing airlines, biased in favor of American and United. Critics charged that travel agent users did a "disproportionate" amount of their business on the system hosts, tending to make their flight selections from the first screen displayed in search results.
The government found these claims to be true and, beginning in 1984, imposed regulations on this business that remained in place, and largely unchanged, for 20 years.
So, without feeling sorry for Google or any technology company involved in the search business, we sure hope this doesn't happen to them or their users.