LOL, this is actually quite funny, considering Google's policy against paid posts and their crackdown on sites/blogs which sell links and paid posts: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-02-10-n43.html They admitted it was a mistake, but still...is this just a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or there never was anything wrong with link buying/selling in the first place for advertising purposes, its just Google being a big bully?
"Do as I do and not as I say" G is live the government... they know everything you do and then wonder why you try to cheat on your taxes...
There isn't anything wrong with links for advertising purposes as long as they are marked as such and use nofollow. In the Japan case, apparently the paid posts were not clearly marked as advertisements and passed PR. Matt Cutts sent a message out on Twitter yesterday saying the Google Japan site had been knocked from PR9 to PR5. Pretty big slip up