This story isn't over.

Oh, sure, the predictable part is over: Google has apparently lifted its threatened yearlong boycott of all CNET news reporters after little more than two months, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt granted an interview last week to CNET News.com reporter Elinor Mills. She is the same writer who triggered the ruckus by Googling Schmidt and publishing the results - including Schmidt's approximate net worth, his recent sales of Google stock and a link to a document that included the executive's home address - to help illustrate a story about Google-related privacy issues. Google's public relations department told CNET the tactic was way out of bounds - an opinion shared by few others inside or outside the news business.

I say the freeze-out has apparently been lifted because, as of this writing, Google has yet to confirm - either publicly or to CNET - that the Schmidt interview represents more than a temporary truce. But the smart money says Google has indeed come to its senses and backed down - the only surprise being that it took this long.

So why should you care about any of this? And why isn't this latest development the end of the story? Good questions.

How a powerful company treats any particular media outlet or reporter doesn't matter a whit in the grand scheme, at least not to most of you - or even to those of us in the press lucky enough to be mere spectators. The Google nuking of CNET may represent the single most egregious overreaction I have seen in 30 years of journalism, but no blood was spilled.

However, what does matter a lot to everyone is how Google sees its role in the ever-more-important balancing act between the value of fingertip access to all kinds of information - including personal information - and the cost that access generates in terms of diminished security, privacy and civility. Personally, I believe such access is well worth the cost. But not everyone agrees ... and Google needs to be front and center making the case.

That's why this story has mattered from the start, and that's why it isn't over today, even if Schmidt's recent interview with CNET does signal the end of immediate hostilities between those two parties.

That Google continues to decline any and all opportunities to defend its position relative to the proper and improper uses of its own service explains why the story is not over and should not be allowed to slip into the archives.

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