While Microsoft has clearly demonstrated what market dominance can do, Google is not far behind and gaining ground. Google is hardly in a position to even attempt blocking Microsoft's unsolicited merger with Yahoo. Here is why, much of what I have to say based on my own experience in doing business with Google: 1) At 75% Internet search ad market share, there really is no other effective game in town if you want to attract the most users to your web site. The rule of numbers speak for themselves. But what are advertisers really paying for? Google's AdWords system is an arcane "black box" where daily keyword rates fluctate like the stock market "in response to market conditions". The problem is we really do not know who is setting the prices, and Google will push prices up if they can get them, regardless of what direction the bids are headed. In this highly inefficient ad marketplace, there is no openness, and we suffer ad pricing on the basis of Google's whim. Yes, Google will argue that they have all kinds of tools to enable users to budget their ads, but in the end the prices are set by Google. 2) Where do our ads go? Unless the ad buyer is willing to carefully track every ad serving and fight in the process, Google AdWords customers that are less careful about their ad campaign may be surprised to learn how much of their ads are being served to irrelevant sites. In short, if there is doubt on where an ad is served, Google gets paid anyway. Since Google collects by charging credit cards, Google may long have taken your money by the time you figure it out -- and they will not give it back without a fight (and at best, you will get a credit as what happened to me). Try complaining, and what you will get is a bunch of canned responses and claims that their system is working properly. In my case, I had an AdWords ad campaign for professional services that seemed to be humming along. Its ad impressions then jumped by a factor of 10 during one month. Using Google's audit tools, I traced this to about 1 million ads served over the course of a few hours on Bebo (a teen-oriented social networking site). Why my ad was being displayed on Bebo remains a mystery, especially considering that I did not see any Google ads shown in Bebo. Clearly something went wrong here, or somebody was gaming the Bebo system. In either case, Google would not admit wrong-doing and insisted their systems were functioning properly. Only after my legal threats did Google agree to credit me the improper ad impressions. The cost to me was several days of fighting Google and pouring over their logs. 3) Google well greases one of the most corrupt businesses to appear on the Web -- mainly the ad spammers who have registered just about every permutation of letters in any alphabet that can be displayed on a computer. Thanks to AdSense, it now pays for slimeball enterprises to collect ad impression revenues for us careless folk who mistype the name of a legitimate site, or take a URL guess at where they want to go. Why doen't Google shut AdSense off on these obvious sites? That might reduce Google earnings. Remember point #3 -- the more ad impressions, even when doubtful, the better it is for Google. 4) Google practices their own kind of censorship. We often read about Google's kowtowing to the Chinese government, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about Google's censoring anything that they think is competition to themselves. This once again happened to me, where two years ago my company provided a service to enable Web users to create their own Web directories and search engines. Google systematically severed all indexed links to our pages. Many attempts to find an explanation, or way to fix this, went unanswered by Google. Just like the Chinese government. Oh -- running AdWords about the service was perfectly OK. 5) Now Google wants to dominate advertising on the airwaves, thanks to their pandering to the FCC. Sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice it will turn precious spectrum into a 99% ad spam center for Google. If they cannot control the illicit practices that AdSense has generated on the wired web, what makes Google think they will do any better in the wireless world? In view of the above, Google has to be viewed as a monopoly and that time is approaching faster than Google's band of evil doers may think.