I read an interesting news item last week sometime. Talking about telcos and how in the US they are slowly strangling smaller isp's and so forth. Then it goes on to say, there are millions of miles of optic fiber laid in the ground that are dark. Not being used. Few years back, telcos went nuts laying this fiber and after doing all this work and spending all that money, they went to regular copper for dsl, etc. And this write suggested that google buy all this fiber optic network and start their own isp, backbone to the net, etc. Wonder if someone at google read that and it is in the works?
Google's undoubtedly holding #1 position among SE, but commenting your remark, I'll say I often use Yahoo and even find it more useful than the others in some respects (e.g. for many additional services it offers). Concerning the very matter of the topic, I'd say that certainly, considering that fact that G. is a monopoly in SE sphere (which is currently a crucial aspect of the functioning of the internet), one must admit that G. has a very huge impact on the Internet that may seem very close to controlling it. At the same time what appears for me personally not quite propitious for G. is that it gets too much commercialized what may lead to marring its status and operating as an unbiased SE.
I can see that they are tracking most of the Internet users through their services like Personalized Search, Urchin Web Stats ...
No Google don't control the internet. There's far far more to the internet than just webpages - and those other arena's are going to grow.
Google holds 60% of the market on search engine industry, there is still 40% market that they have to cover. MSN and Yahoo for sure wont go down without a fightrolleyes: Google does not control the internet yet, but they have a BIG potential on doing so. G is expanding to other services like Gbuy and the said to be Google OS(if its true), Google is just steps away to controlling the Internet. I think