[iGuides]

I guess the webmasters should stop worrying about google. Consider it a separate company and let them do whatever they do. Moreover when you make quality sites and concentrate on getting good traffic , google will do its job perfectly. It will reward your site with traffic

I like this point, but that sounds Paid Links gave the new horizons to webmasters to think about separate entities. May be market is going to be saturated, as already if you check ShoeMoney they are getting only 4% SE (search engines) traffic so it will lead to idea to build traffic for your site by yourself, by your own efforts.

How would Google be able to verify that a link is paid?

It will be always complicated stuff for the Google to judge with the true paid link, and natural linking will be de-valued to by false paid link reports.

They are actually killing the directory industry, Matt Cutts specifically said that if you run a directory with quality sites, that is okay. If you accept any link then you may have problems.

Directories are not only concern, blogs and other sites got penalized too after that paid links reporting started, more ridiculous thing is JohnChow who are making big amount of money over the internet, Google penalized that blog at first It seems Google does not like any money making machine in this virtual world but the Google only.