"You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google"

Go to the ticketmaster website and show me where it says you are entering a contract and why you should be charged with a FELONY CRIME for entering a fake name/payment details on their website. There is a huge difference between civil and criminal. Would you have a problem if slashdot can slip into the registration form that if you didnt disclose your real name and address on your profile that you can be sent to jail and be forced to pay them $5 million dollars of restitution? This is why we have civil lawsuits, there is absolutely no reason tax payers should be responsible for funding a criminal investigation to help ticketmaster. Where do you think their "ill-gotten gains" they are going to be forced to give up are going to, you?

OK so they have to put in their ToS that someone can only sign up for a maximum of x number of accounts and THEN its a felony. Got ya.

This is wrong, I have not found any evidence that they hacked computers or used browser exploits to infect PCs or anything of that nature. Everything I have found says that they used computer servers rented at datacenters and then networked them together sort of like any other internet business does. When a media story talks about someone "hacking" a bank the slashdot crowd gets upset because the media is portraying a term that to them is supposed to mean clever programming tricks, linux, tinkering, etc. When its the other way around and the media is describing a datacenter as a botnet, which is technically true, the crowd goes with it and assumes that something evil is going on.

So if you sign up for gmail and say that you are from Beverly Hills 90210 and your name is Darth Vader then you should be convicted and go to jail for committing fraud against Google because you are using an assumed name?

"In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date."

The 'botnet' these articles are talking about are their own dedicated servers, not virus infections like they are trying to imply. You don't need a botnet to crack captchas, you can use a server to queue up 1000's of captcha images and have third world workers solve them for a tenth of a cent. This entire case is basically just explaining someones business and then inserting and replacing words with ones that have bad connotations to get the public to think that they have solved a crime. Just replace the words 'computer network' with 'botnet', 'revenue' with 'ill-gotten gains', sending a web request with 'impersonating users', and throw in the words fraud, hacking, scheme, and bogus every other word and you can make anything look like organized crime.