I don't think Patrick read into anything there. He does not imply that Google did this intentionally at all.

His point holds water for me, getting blocked by Google is a huge problem for any business, and its impossible to get in touch with Google short of making a fuss.

Consider this tweet from Dropbox:

"Having trouble reaching the right folks @ Google re: browser warnings; email abuse@dropbox.com to help, thanks"

http://twitter.com/Dropbox/status/5612052146

Not to mention, the timing sucks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935009 (Google announces today they've increased their storage quota to 20GB/$5, which happens to be very competitive with Dropbox).

Not getting out the tinfoil hat, but this isn't right.

Not really, his point is valid. They wield a terrifying amount of power over most web-based businesses, and they're not very careful with it as they're not beholden to any site. If you get bumped from their index, you can immediately lose a very large percentage of your traffic and have very little hope of regaining it on the MONTHS timeframe. For a startup, that could mean game over.