The cost of "ethically" maintaining their service is that sometimes a case will fall through the cracks and information that probably should have remained available will be unduly censored because Google can't afford to do exhaustive analysis of every request that comes in. And that's a cost we all get to bear.

...who would also be subject to European laws and thus likewise potentially unable to run a successful search engine business without being sued into oblivion.

The phrase "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind.

Remember that this ruling will apply to every search engine or other public index. Does anyone in Europe really want them all to just pull out of Europe because the European legal system makes it impractical to do business there?

So you're saying the limited physical space to run wires and the huge upfront capital costs make for a natural monopoly? Good, then you must agree that the argument that regulating the market incumbents as a monopoly will reduce new entrants to the market is complete bullsh#@t because new entrants effectively can't enter the market anyway. Glad we're all on the same page.

Not that I have a particular opinion on the specifics of this case but I think you may have truncated that quote a few words to early

I read that to mean "no crime was committed in New Jersey" not "no crime took place".

It doesn't bother you at all that it took several days of information gathering for the CEO of a multi-million dollar crypto-currency bank/trading house to discover that there were wide scale, systemic issues with his crypto-currency trading business?

<sarcasm>Yeah how dare Google pay its employees well! And where do they get off providing a perk that makes their employee's commutes less onerous while simultaneously taking cars off the road, reducing traffic congestion and air pollution for everyone! I mean who do they think they are!! Certainly a Nazi-esque bit of "evil" if I've ever seen one.</sarcasm>

But being so terrified and anxiety filled that I feel the need to carry a deadly weapon with me at all times is still OK right?

Agreed. But then there are the follow up considerations of

a) Is it the case that open source software is in fact being subject to subjected to scrutiny by independent experts? I would say that certainly some of it is, but I would hazard a guess that not all of it is.

b) How does an uninformed laymen differentiate between an "independent expert" and a "random stranger on the internet". In the absence of doing actual research it's much easier for people outside the field to simply trust the blue chip fortune 500 company.

In my (admittedly casual) experience, such arguments by the FSF rarely get into this level of detail, which causes people that don't really grok the whole open source thing, or people that are cynical about open source in general or the FSF in particular, to question whether the FSF is actually concerned with security or whether they are simply using this as an excuse to push their ideological agenda.

In fairness I think the counter argument is a little more nuanced than you're representing it. It's more along the lines of: non-programmers are in no position to verify that things have been done correctly even if the program is open source. And even experienced programmers can't, as a practical matter, be expected to meticulously review the millions of lines of code that goes into the various programs they use, nor are they likely to build all of their own software from source all the time. So realistically, even if the software is open source you still have to trust some else to verify it. All open source does is change who the person is that your'e trusting from Microsoft to $YOUR_FAVOURITE_FREE_SOFTWARE_GROUP.

Now perhaps you trust the general open source community more than you trust Microsoft (or Google or Apple or whoever). That's perfectly fine. But I can certainly see how a reasonable person could look at that position and go "why should I trust random strangers on the internet if I'm not willing to trust Microsoft?". Now perhaps that's not good argument. But I think it's at least a little bit more substantive than the strawman you've presented.

By that definition it would be a function of the free market for me to break into your house and steal all your stuff, in the absence of a police force to put a gun to my head and stop me.

Kind of depends what you're trying to trace. When people talk about traceable financial transactions they're generally interested in identifying the people involved in the transaction not the individual monetary units.

eg the police could give a @!#% that the $100 bill with serial number 12345 was used to buy drugs. What they want to know is that Bill bought $100 worth of drugs.

In that sense bitcoin is good for untraceable financial transactions since (as far as I understand such things) the best we can determine is that anonymous bitcoin user #2627577 transferred 100 BTC to anonymous bitcoin user #820998.

Doesn't make it wrong either. My point was only that it was possible for users to derive value from it, as the GPs argument seemed to be that scanning the users email was OK so long as the user was benefiting.

Now perhaps other free email services don't scan your email (although maybe they do and they're just not as up front about it), but I personally think that's something the free market can sort out. I remember what free web mail services were like before GMail and personally I'm glad that Google got into the mail business because I think that their service is much better. And personally I'm quite happy to let Google's robots scan my mail to decide what adds to show. I consider that a small price to pay in exchange for an excellent free mail service.

However, I certainly recognize that that opinion is entirely my own subjective value judgement and that other people may not share it. That's perfectly fine. I would suggest that those people go ahead and not use GMail (rather than trying to have it outlawed so that I can't use it). I also recognize that there are some people that are concerned that even mail they send to other GMail users or that is just forwarded by Google's mail servers might also be scanned. I would suggest that those people might want to reconsider what they're sending over email and/or their use of email entirely, as, if they don't trust Google to handle this data responsibly, I don't know why they would trust any of the dozen or so other third parties that might handle their email in transit.

...except in so far as it allows the service provider to make a profit thereby enabling the customer to get access to the service for free.