• Bloomberg News, Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:30 AM

Google better watch out: President Barack Obama's nominee to be the next U.S. antitrust chief has her eye on the search giant. Bloomberg digs up comments made by Christine A. Varney at an American Antitrust Institute event last summer in which she described Google as a monopolist that seeks to dominate online computing the same way Microsoft dominated software.

"For me, Microsoft is so last century," Varney said. They are not the problem." She added that the U.S. economy will "continually see a problem -- potentially with Google" because it already "has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising." While these remarks were made months before Obama picked her to head the Justice Department's antitrust division, Bloomberg says, "the comments signal her approach to the job if confirmed by the Senate."

Microsoft, you'll remember, was nearly broken apart when it was brought before the Justice Department in 1998. Varney, who lobbied the Clinton administration on behalf of Netscape to urge antitrust enforcers to sue Microsoft, did not comment in the Bloomberg story. White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that Obama nominated Varney "to vigorously enforce the law" and "is confident that she can do so in a fact-specific and evenhanded way with every matter she will face."

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