I have yet to see a solid argument for the evil of autolink; the "if I were a bookstore" line keeps popping up, but it just doesn't work -- as you point out, autolink only affects text that wasn't already a link. So if I'm a bookstore, what the heck am I doing not linking to my own products? That argument just doesn't hold water.

Nor does the argument about "changing my content"; you mentioned a few other extensions which reformat pages, and nobody's throwing fits about them, so why should this be any different just because it's Google doing it? How do we justify a double standard where it's OK to do ad-blocking and OK to auto-generate links to Wikipedia articles but pure evil to link package tracking numbers back to UPS or Fedex?

And the argument about commercialization doesn't really work either; you say that you don't want your website to be commercialized, but nobody's doing that. Google doesn't make a dime from linking people to Amazon. Also, I find it odd that you seem to think a link to an Amazon info page is "commercialization." Do you use JavaScript to disable right-clicking and make sure people can't copy/paste that ISBN? Do you pop up a message which says "Sorry, this is a non-commercial site, so you're not allowed to go find out more about the book I just mentioned"?

What this comes down to, in my opinion, is a matter of disrespecting users. The attitude I see so often in this argument is one of "it's *my* content, who are *they* to go and do things with it?" Well, they're the users. They're the ones you put it up there for. If they want to look up more information about that book you mentioned, or find directions to the restaurant you reviewed, who are you to stop them?

The rest of this article I'll ignore; somehow it's become an article of faith in certain circles that Google not only could be the next Microsoft, but that they inevitably will be and that they'll be hundreds of times worse. I've never understood that mindset and I don't feel like arguing with it.

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