Sgt_Kickaxe - 9:58 am on Jan 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Google hate or Google pay-back is not constructive to the conversation. It's not personal unless "you", a rhetorical "you", were part of the problem selling illegal products and sadly miss your income.

I disagree Tangor - it's personal when this company holds my private information. Their actions create ripples that may very well impact me personally. Had they been shut down for what they did, or forced to pay 5 billion instead of 500 million, there would have been an impact in their bottom line which affects all their services. Perhaps they were forced to hand over account data for all adwords customers, in which case my information is traveling. There is also the trust factor... Nobody wants to deal with a company in legal trouble, besides the lawyers anyway.

internal documents obtained by investigators demonstrate that senior Google executives, including now-CEO Larry Page, "knew what was going on.

Did they take steps to profit or to protect themselves (and thus me since I deal with them)? They sold out and got caught. Will a price increase in adwords be the result? An exodus of advertisers perhaps causing lower adsense click returns? Criminal charges are not trivial.