> “saw something on the blog they interpreted as out-of-bounds from Google policy and took it down.” The disastrous consequences probably stemmed from “just a stupid mistake,” she said.

So it is a bit like when the cat trips, falls down the stairs in some undignified way, then immediately stands up keeps walking like nothing happens, looking like "Yeah I totally planned to do that, it was not an accident"

Perhaps after so much time has passed and so much stonewalling, it is just too late to admit that they made a mistake apologize and restore content. (Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). It seems in their best interest to keep quiet and stonewall the issue until it goes away.

But on the other side, given that content there -- which included slightly edited explicit ads, it is probably not surprising Google did what they did. I imagine for every site with content like that, Google employees would go out of their way to see maybe the user is a known artist or writer and this is just art. That's understandable, however what is not understandable is not having a way to restore, warn before, or explain what happened afterwards and have a way to revert the action.

I imagine at this point Google is pretty much a monopoly. If it decided to charge to use GMail, or force me to listen to a 5 minute ad every, I don't know if there is an alternative that has email, docs, calendar, and others at the same level of quality.