(Disclaimer: I work for Google, there's been informal internal discussions.)
What seems like it might be going on isn't that Google et. al are doing anything unusual, so much as they're taking advantage of loopholes that may have been established for the benefit of other industries, without paying off the politicians. The reasonable thing to do would be to change the laws, not to target individual companies.
I can't say I'm very familiar with the details, though.
Well, I don't work for Google (though sometimes I wish I did), but I agree that any company which does not use all the available rules to minimize its taxes should have its CFO fired. After all, that's what a person would do if she found out that the person doing her taxes deliberately does not maximize her return.
Of course, there is a difference between maximizing your tax return this one year and carefully milking the loopholes for decades. Google is not doing a good job of the latter, so whoever is responsible for Google PR should be replaced with someone more competent.
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.