Not really. We rallied pretty hard against the Clipper Chip. John Perry Barlow ran in those circles (he interviewed Ted Nelson for one Mondo issue) and the EFF was a big presence in the hacker culture.

I'll admit we were naive about Google, though. But at the time, they were a couple college students taking on "big business". In a way, they were re-democratizing the Internet, and that was a good thing. "Don't be evil" was exactly the kind of message we expected to hear from an Internet company.

I kind of feel like Google actually believed what they were saying at the time. Paul Buchheit, speaking of "don't be evil," said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out"--he wanted people to remember it and call them out if they broke it.

The fact that Page and Brin have increasingly distanced themselves from it, and gotten increasingly irritated when reminded of it, says to me that they've changed a lot since back then. The people they are today would never have saddled themselves with such a slogan in the first place.