Actually googlebowling is now a fact. People have proved it.
The reason why its happeniing is because google cannot determine if a web site's off site activity is done by the site owner or a black hat seo. And google (the algorithm) assumes that it must be done by the owner. Meaning anyone can associate a website with negative seo – or obvious black hat seo techniques and have a site de-indexed from google. Googlebowling is happening and its a big problem now.

read this

blackhatpublications.com

I don't believe it's that easy. The obvious assumption to draw from "Google cannot know if off-site activity is done by the webmaster of the target domain" is that "Google will err on the side of the webmaster". Or else, I could googlebowl CNN.com out of the rankings by associating it with blackhat activity, which would destroy Google's ranking quality. Maybe there *is* a way to googlebowl, but it can't be as simple and obvious as that. E.g. maybe there is a ratio algorithm in play; once your backlinks are 99% bad neighborhood, you get penalized. A site like CNN.com would then have, say, 5% bad neighborhood backlinks, but that wouldn't result in a penalty.