Of course they've agreed to pay it, according to the article it only takes 3 hours for them to generate $17mm in revenue. Plus the more they fight this, the more it's in the headlines and the more people are aware of Google's nefarious actions.

In the 7 stages of a business life-cycle, I'd say Google is in phase 5, expansion. However, they are expanding so much and attempting to dip their toes in to so much of our lives that I think stage 6 "mature" and stage 7 "exit" are going to come more quickly than many people would assume.

A while back, mk wrote about Google+ and its implications. He wrote,

"The best way to serve people is to develop tools that make it easier for people to do what they want. Google often does this very well. In my opinion, Google usually succeeds by taking a pragmatic and efficient approach to address a need. However, now that Google is building a social network that spans across their applications, it will be more difficult for Google engineers to build applications that simply align with a particular need. Instead, Google applications now must not only align with a specific need, they must align with the needs of the Google+ meta-application."

This growth mindset is a dangerous thing in the long run because you start sacrificing the quality of your product or service to accommodate broad growth. You start doing stupid things like tracking the users of competitors web browsers.

Enjoy stage 5 Google, you're making your own bed.