In the UK Google has avoided paying something like £450M in tax which would have built schools and hospitals – but then made a global charity donation of £12M.

Google have avoided paying some currency conversion costs something like $35M – if you look at the typical advice for this type of cost saver it is to pass it on to your suppliers – make them pay you in $.

Google insist of people paying for clicks not web site hits with Google Adsense. This is my personal hate. I wasted something like 18% of my advertising budget on clicks which were not site hits.

But I don’t think offering free, standards-based software, lets Google get away with abusive power. Come to think of it, Google is actually much _MORE_ insidious than it appears. Unlike MS which publicly flouted public standards with its own ideas for those standards, Google has been courting the programming community to come up with new standards that benefit everyone, most of all Google itself, which stands to make money no matter what its developers and legions of fanboys do.

Just wait a few years, when Google dominates just about every web-based thing, controls the software for smartphones, search, email, etc. it will be a Google world; eventually, people will get tired of it and revolt just like they did against MS. But that will probably take a generation or two to happen. In the meantime, Larry, Sergey, and Eric will get richer and more powerful.