Mathew Ingram asks a very good question about Google's quest to get rid of things like "Pay per Post": is it a quest for purity on the web, or a simple matter of crushing the competition:

The question remains: is Google just trying to maintain the purity of the search experience, so that people don’t get misled by paid posts? If so, that’s a fairly noble goal (PPP’s disclosure policy requires bloggers to say somewhere on their site that they use PayPerPost, but not on the individual post). Or is the search giant just concerned with others selling paid links because that’s competition for AdSense? If so, that’s not such a noble goal. And how do we tell the difference?

I think a simple way to start telling the difference is my post title: Who benefits? It's time to get rid of the sappy "no evil" theory about Google, and look at them for what they are: a shareholder driven corporation, like everyone else.

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