Antitrust

Posting has been light because Antitrust has been my sole focus for a week. Hence, the relevance of this:

Not surprisingly, analysts are saying the Microsoft-Yahoo story has one clear winner: Google. And its stock price reflected that thinking Monday. More than $4 billion was added to Google’s value as the stock price rose 2.34 percent.

Not yet 10 years old, Google has emerged as a powerhouse that is wielding tremendous power in the world of technology and beyond. It was able to influence a government auction of broadcast spectrum. It nudged several cellphone companies into opening up their networks to the phones of rivals.

Its influence is all the more surprising, because its economic power is still derived largely from a single, seemingly prosaic business: the ability to place interesting text advertisements in front of people when they do searches. Advertisers pay for those ads — sometimes $1 or less — only when users click on them. In a sense, Google has built a highly profitable $16.6 billion empire a dollar at a time.

“They are the company that is going to have more influence and more control over the structure of the world information industry than any other,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “The right way to think about Google is they are the next Microsoft.”

I wonder, did people love Microsoft in its early days the way people love Google today?  I’m pretty comfortable with Google “making” me look at simple text ads in exchange for ubiquitous, free tools.  I’m worried about its information gathering, of course, and my guess is that Google’s Big Brother-ness will be what we hate about it in the future.