• Fortune, Friday, May 8, 2009 11:30 AM

"It was bound to happen," says Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang. "Google couldn't get this dominant -- currently at 76% of the search market -- without attracting some attention from DC." But the question remains whether the company has played by the rules in coming to dominate search. "The last thing the 'do no evil' company wants is a rehash of Microsoft's situation in the 1990s," Yang says.

Of course, Google thinks it has played by rules. It maintains that competition is still "just one click away," which is to say there's nothing really preventing users from switching to another search engine. It's just that Google provides superior results. Google also tries to keep its software open, so users can export Google Docs into Microsoft Word, or Adobe's PDF, and other competing platforms. The argument is that Google never locks anyone in, so if a user wants a better piece of software, the open formats make it easy to change.

As James Stewart wrote in The Wall Street Journal: "Google's continued gains in market share bear out my contention that Google is that rare breed: the natural monopoly. By natural, I also mean lawful, since the monopoly derives from Google's skill and qualities inherent in the business, not from anticompetitive behavior." He adds: "I sometimes get the sense that antitrust regulators, in their single-minded zeal to promote competition, ignore the fact that monopolies, in and of themselves, aren't illegal, or even necessarily bad."

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