OK, so Michael Arrington doesn't go so far as to say that Google has become evil this year, but he does argue that 2008 will likely be the year that the search giant loses its "innocence" in terms of
media and government perception.
Google's DoubleClick acquisition took nearly a year's worth of scrutiny from regulators (particularly in Europe) before it was cleared, and Arrington
reports that U.S. politicians are already "lining up" to examine the proposed Yahoo outsourcing deal. Not to mention the fact that some in the media are drawing attention to Google's default search
box status in Firefox.
"This may be the year that things change for the ten-year-old Google," he says. "Their days of innocence may be over--perhaps Yahoo, or Firefox, are the apples that
they should not have bitten into."
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