The post I mentioned in my last response:
These kinds of tech monopolies are old news, in Google's case I don't think it's that big a deal. I was far more concerned about Ted Turner's old uber-monopoly where he pretty much tried to take over television and as many global media sources as he could to basically become the god-king of information in a much more real and tangible way for the time. I've always had mixed opinions about the "Microsoft Monopoly" which I won't get into here because it's pretty much off the subject of Google.
It's easy to look at Google and what it controls and says "they are a threat", but in the final equasion there isn't a whole lot Google can actually do on a large scale. Highly valuable and sensitive information like goverment secrets can be kept off of the world wide web, there is some unpleasant stuff there, but it isn't like Google is going to get their hands on the really nasty stuff that could do damage. "Wikileaks" and the like is about the worst Google can do on an actual global scale.
TV, Radio, and even archaic print media all also currently compete with Google in the same basic territory, and while it would love to crush these things and absorb everything onto The Internet, that more or less isn't likely to happen. Unlike the time of Ted Turner where he was more or less taking over everything that was there at the time with no other noticible competition.
Google also doesn't control much in the way of tangible resources at the moment as far as I've seen, or even heard implied. A lot of the big "problem corperations" got that way because they have more than "soft" power, along with that they have an investment in "hard power" by having interests in manufacturing, aerospace, heavy machinery, and other things. Disney for example has gotten some criticism in the past because while it presents itself as a friendly media empire, it also has very tangible assets, enough where unlike most other corperations it actually could manufacture a military entirely in house and try some insane video-game PMC (or Cyber-punk like) attack on rival businesses or attempts to take over goverments. Not that it would likely ever do this, but the point is at the end of the day the question is always "what can you actually do", and that comes down to more than your reported income and money in the bank. I'm not going to say Google doesn't have any tangible assets, but as far as I can tell they don't have enough to really worry about, nor do they have any pretensions of using them. Disney can always claim that it supports/owns all of these businesses for developing resorts and properties, and also due to it's long-standing committment to progress and development shown through things like Epcott (where at various exhibits they make a big deal about how much money Disney puts into say energy companies and what it basically runs when you visit their "energy" attraction with all the dinosaurs, which is mostly what people remember along with the corperate sponsors (Exxon I believe was a big one when I was there many years ago), as opposed to what Disney mentions they actually do (or did mention).
The threat Google mainly provides is to nations becoming invested in things like "national firewalls" to prevent outside ideas from getting in for purposes of cultural preservation. The fact that Google goes along with the internet means that to evern have a hope of security you need Google to pretty much be on your side. I actually think that nations being able to control information this way is a bad thing, and prevents people from coming together through the spread of ideas, so I support a lot of Googles efforts, while at the same time saying very nasty things about them when they have basically been bought by nations like China.
Privacy concerns are a mixed bag, to be honest a lot of the issues come from people being too stupid to understand what they put on The Internet is not a secret. That and goverments that has so far been unwilling to put much effort into personal privacy regulation, instead largely focusing on the actions of google on a larger level in bringing information in, in an general sense, than the protection of "private" information at the bottom of the food chain. Simply put I think a lot of the problems here could be solved if the goverment simply banned businesses from asking from identification and personal information, of course at the same time the reason why that doesn't happen is because the goverment itself wants to exploit that information for tracking purposes. If Google and similar companies don't provide that infrastructure the goverment is going to do it another way. Your not going to get rid of the practice entirely, which is why seemingly simple things will never happen, it's a problem that doesn't specifically come from Google.
To my way of thinking I'm not really concerned that much about Google unless it winds up merging with large corperations with a more material power base. If it buys out, or gets bought out by, or merges with, a company like Sony, Disney, etc... no matter how the financial end of things look that's when you have to worry because your merging Google's "soft" power with a lot of "hard power". This kind of information control and infrastructure combined with the abillity to make things happen in the real world (other than paying people off and the like) is where those frightening old school Cyberpunk mega-corperation ideas come from.
I have my eyes mostly on Umbrella corperations (The Resident Evil Corperation takes it's name from a type of corperation, though nowadays the joke does kind of write itself) with a lot of diverse interests. I'm less concerned about a corperation with trillions in the bank and a very specific focus, or group of related focuses, that just builds it's base of money, than I am with a compartitively humble company that might only be measured in a handfull of billions but has interests accross a wide spectrum of fields, and keeps feeding it's profits into obtaining more "hard" power rather than building up what it has in the bank. At the end of the day a board of directors that can swipe a credit card and buy a fleet of jets, are less scary than one that could in theory manufacture a fleet of jets without telling anyone, load tanks of their own manufacture on them, and attack someone without any real oversight. In general this kind of thing doesn't happen (yet) but it's been a hypothetical possibility for a very long time, and the basic building blocks for it exist, which is how a lot of the speculative fiction about futures of corperate warlords came to exist. Right or wrong, a company like Sony scares me more than Google ever will, largely because some of these multinationals could probably kill every Google employee and operation on earth inside of 24 hours if they ever wanted to, not to mention military conquests of countries, or inflict so much terrorism it would make The Middle East look pathetic in comparison. Whether they would ever do it or not is irrelevent, that's the kind of power you have to be worried about people having and potentially misusing.
Such are my thoughts. Yes I'm arguably an insane paranoid, but then again so are people who worry about Google having too much power. The big point is I think your insane paranoia is being directed at the wrong targets, and if a threat from major corperations ever DOES really meterialize it's going to be from those with "hard" power not "soft" power IT companies.
