Putting The Google-Is-Ripping-Off-A-Kenyan-Startup Story In Perspective

When you think about what Google, the 32,000-employee search engine conglomerate, is strategically focused on these days, here?s one thing that doesn?t come to mind: an initiative to get more Kenyan businesses online via manually grabbing data from a local startup that?s trying to do something complementary.
I?ve been looking into the well-researched story that Mocality, a Kenya-based business listing service, published this morning. There are certainly serious issues it brings up, as Google has admitted. But there?s nothing anywhere near the same magnitude as, say, the press fallout and antitrust probe around the new Google+ search integration, or the Motorola acquisition, the Android patent licensing issues, or the many other efforts and problems it has happening every day.
The gist, as Robin covered this morning, is that Mocality had its own program for gathering offline business information and posting it as a proprietary and searchable online database. The problem was that Google was taking this data (thereby breaking the startup?s usage terms), saying it was partnering with Mocality (which was not true), and offering businesses their own web addresses, sites, and web usage tips (which Mocality doesn?t do). While Google?s Getting Kenyan Businesses Online program may have been helping to bring more Kenyan businesses online through this strategy, it was benefiting from Mocality?s work without asking permission, without giving anything back  in exchange.
Oddly, as Mocality discovered, the effort was so extensive that a Google-affiliated call center in India was at one point calling Kenyan businesses, trying to say that Google was working with Mocality to do things like provide them with their own web sites.

Here are some reasons I?ve pieced together for why this whole thing was most likely done by some rogue local employees and/or contractors, who did not have the permission of anyone with significant authority at Google.
– The Getting Businesses Online initiative is two years old, and hig