After I wrote the blog entry "We have met the enemy, and he is us", I reread a bit of David Weidner's article. One thing that struck me was that Google was founded with the help of a federal grant!
I thought I would check a bit further, and found "National Science Foundation (NSF) Discoveries - On the Origins of Google". The article was written long after the fact and I didn't try to dig out the original grant. I do wonder if Page and Brin would have even been in graduate school without the grant.
I don't know the size of the grant, but think of the huge amount of income taxes paid each year by the 16,000 employees of Google. Think of the productivity increases of many researchers in companies large and small thanks to Google. I wouldn't be surprised if that one grant paid many times over for all the similar grants made at the same time.
