Google has been accused of, and increasingly being found guilty of, a great many things: run-ins with the FTC (the Canadian pharmacy settlement comes to mind),

Google has been accused of, and increasingly being found guilty of, a great many things: run-ins with the FTC (the Canadian pharmacy settlement comes to mind), to the DOJ (consent decree... companies rarely agree to these unless there's some there there), to artists being forced to list their catalogs with Google in order to have them automatically scan/take down copyright violations on YouTube (a form of tying IMO), to scraping web sites for the purposes of competing with them (Yelp etc.), to contractually eliminating any real competition re: Android (this was a story on HN in the last couple days re: finally something being done about it in the EU at least), to 'no-poach' agreements with other companies for employees and on and on. None of this is unique to Google or even the tech industry: when a company gets an advantage, they tend to press it. When pressing it works, they press a bit more. They will continue to ratchet up what they are doing until they meet significant market resistance or are otherwise stopped. When you are able to use your market position/power to eliminate the competition and/or abuse your customers, the tendency is to do so when it helps the bottom line. Rarely is there an edict from the top that says 'go forth and do great evil', it's usually more a bunch of people in the organization being told from above 'hit your numbers', 'close the sale', 'get it done' (sometimes with an implicit or even explicit 'or else') and self-interest takes care of the rest. When you get the right mix of market power and greed, about the only entity that can deal with it is the government as market forces are no longer functioning.