[waiwai933]

The article says the statement was in response to audience questions, so this may have been in planning before Bitcoin was even released in 2009 (for all we know, Satoshi Nakamoto could be a Google employee who decided to take up the project personally). Not saying this is the case (obviously I don't have any proof either way), and I'm not personally that fond of Google, but Google may not entirely be at fault here.

[notatoad]

I was following along for theverge's live blog of his keynote, i got the impression that this was a pre-bitcoin notion and it was dropped because they predicted most of the problems bitcoin is currently experiencing.

To me, the much more interesting part of his speech was that he seemed very in favor of overthrowing governments who restrict Internet access.

I may be reading too much into things on both of these points.