[toyg]

> an acknowledgement of the insane power that would inevitably accumulate

That's overthinking it. "Don't be evil" is just the kind of slogan that could emerge in the '90s, when it became clear that good and bad were not linked to a specific organizational form or trait - you could have bad capitalism and good collectivism as well as the other way around. There was a feeling that "big business" was bad but "medium business" could be a force for good, you only had to stay decent and things would work out. And of course the 'net would have rejected any clipper-chip and not replicate the historical corruption of the real world.

Those were very naive times, in retrospect, but I don't blame the original googlers for believing in a simplistic view of the world. I blame Eric Schmidt and his sponsors for hiding their evil behind that line. Modern Google is basically all Schmidt.