Everybody loves to hate a monopoly...

 There is a lot of history we have with hating monopolies.  Think AT&T or Microsoft.  They're large, non-responsive, their decisions are universally derided, and yet they invariably provide some essential product or service that almost everybody uses.  Go figure.

Examples of monopolies we love to hate:

Ask Slashdot: Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft?

The Phone Companies Still Don't Get It

The Utility We Still Love To Hate

My own experience with The Phone Company

First, I had AT&T phone service.  It was expensive, resulting in being deathly afraid of having to call anyone out of town.  Then there was the start of competition with MCI and the like, then the breakup, and long distance costs were more reasonable, but the local version (Indiana Bell) of the monopoly seemed to be more bureaucratic than the national one.  I have fond memories of having every ISDN order being fowled up and spending hours on the phone with executive escalation to get it straightened out.  Even years later as the consolidation started, and I was now dealing withAmeritech, things were no better - I was so afraid to change anything on the ISDN line (for fear of having no service at all for months) that I delayed converting to DSL for about a decade.  Soon afterwards, they got bought out and became SBC, but still nothing changed - my DSL went out every few months for a few days, simply because nobody knew how to reboot the Radius server when it went down.

Then finally the ultimate insult came: SBC bought AT&T and renamed themselves back to AT&T.  The phone company had gone full circle and was back where it started from.  A monopoly is still a monopoly, no matter what you call it.

I now have an unbundled DSL on Speakeasy, and used NPA to move my local phone number to an ITSP named Teliax.  I spend about $10-$15 per month on my phone line, which is now fully digital and is answered by my Asterisk server.

What about Google?

The real question is this: Why hasn't Google succumbed to being just another hated monpoly?

They fit the definition of a de-facto monopoly:  

    - They are the biggest by far in their field

    - Their decisions are often condemned by others 

    - They appear unresponsive to customer requests 

    - They provide some useful product everybody needs

And yet, they are not universally hated.  Why? 

Could it be one of the tenets of their corporate philosophy?

You can make money without doing evil

This sets them apart from making the majority of decisions based on greed, which is what (IMHO) is actually causing the hatred of monopolies.  It's not that they're large, it's not that they are often unresponsive, it's that they allow themselves to make decisions based on what will make the most money, not what is right or in thebest interests of the customer.