I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft “monopoly” ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google. Does the fact that Google’s products are mostly free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny?

This is an interesting argument, but there’s one critical difference: Google does not partake in monopolistic activities.

One of the big problems with Microsoft was when they pre-installed Internet Explorer on Windows with no way to remove it, leveraging their OS monopoly to gain an unfair advantage in the browser market. They got sued, added a “remove software” option to let people remove pre-installed software (IE, Windows Media Player, etc.). Now, even though their OS market share has barely shifted (definitely under 5% shift), few people complain about their monopoly anymore.

I’m not saying they’re okay now (or even that what Google’s done is in the best interest of the internet), but the reason no one complains about Google’s monopoly is because they created it legitimately, and they don’t do evil things with it.