At this point I'm convinced that they never meant this. It was simply a recruiting slogan to attract all the liberal/libertarian/anti-coporation comp sci students who went to Stanford and Berkeley.
I'm pretty sure that early on (when pb coined the phrase), it was meant like "don't be like the other evil companies we've seen on the Internet in the past") (which presumably at the time meant Microsoft, maybe USG, maybe ITU, etc.) Which Google probably broadly believed internally. (this was in the early 2000s).
