Hey, Google, Search for This: Competitors

With more and more businesses reliant on Google for advertising and search services, there may be regulation on the horizon for the online Goliath. The solution? Healthy competition, Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick says, which it's not getting enough of. Major innovation by Microsoft and Yahoo may be precisely what it needs to avoid the monopoly label.

With Google currently dominating 50% of the US Internet search market, he also sees its pro-net-neutrality stance coming back to haunt the company, because as it becomes more essential to online commerce, advertisers and content makers will appeal to regulators for similarly evenhanded treatment. It's just the kind of logic that previously applied in anti-trust suits against IBM and Microsoft, Kirkpatrick argues. (More Google stories.)