Following up on the story from yesterday, what a nightmare. I’m happy Google did (at least partially) the right thing in demoting the Chrome download site for 60 days — but I’m still not convinced it shouldn’t have been an outright ban, and for longer.

We all knew that everyone was going to pass the buck on this. Google hired a company to produce Chrome ads. They apparently thought they’d only be video ads, but they ended up (through another company) in paid posts. Yuck.

Google’s legal department has the other companies involved saying the right thing (which is an exact echo of what Google itself is saying), but I’m still not sure how they couldn’t be aware of at least the possibility of this happening. I think my back-and-forth with Frederic Lardinois sums this up pretty well:

@fredericl right. that’s like saying you hired a hitman to “clean”, then being surprised that he killed someone.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) January 3, 2012

Passing the buck drives me insane. Again, I’m glad Google is taking some action, but they should fully fess up to this. They fucked up, pure and simple. Why are they advertising Chrome through third parties that clearly do shady things? Because it will hep market share? Barf. 

Again — and I’m going to keep harping on this — there’s too much overlap in Google’s different businesses now. What seems like a good idea to one area of the company, turns out to be one of the dumbest things Google has ever done. 

This is only going to get worse.