PageRank

There is so much activity with sites and blogs losing PR lately that it is becoming very difficult to know what is acceptable to Google in recent times. I am sure that all the recent changes are to 'punish' those who Google think are paying for links. This could have a profound effect on the blogging world and those who have sought to 'exploit' the blogging phenomenon to place adverts either subtly or blatantly. It also surely has an effect on ANY web advertising. There are countless legitimate industry 'portal' sites that obviously accept adverts and obviously charge for the privilege - in many cases these sites are run by industry magazine publishers familiar with the concept of paid advertising. Will Google then slap all of these portals and all of those traders who advertise with them?
Where does this end?
Sadly, this ends with Google losing it's business model in a monopoly row - I say sadly because Google has been a fantastic model of what can be achieved with the world-wide web, but you can't allow one commercial enterprise that has it's fingers in the pie of web advertising (Adwords and Adsense) to regulate the traffic that may be driven to competitor websites. Google is too successful with it's search engine to allow it to manipulate search results with the objective of devaluing web advertising when Google itself promotes it's own web advertising products.
With the speed of change that the internet brings, I will be surprised if this is allowed to continue for much more than another twelve months.