News.com recently published an interesting article about the precarious position Google is finding itself in. The one sentence summary: given it’s dominance, there are growing concerns about Google’s practices.

Unlike the other big tech monopoly, Microsoft, Google has always been a good citizen; but the bigger it gets, the more tempting it must be to take a bite from that proverbial fruit.

As both the company and the temptation grows, more people will be snipping at the one-time search-engine company. Ideally, those “guardians” will keep Google inline without hurting the company. What they won’t do is make Google’s balancing act between two basic choices any easier. Essentially, Google can:

• continue to innovate, and given its primacy, be accused of misdeeds;
• or stop, thereby losing the edge that makes Google Google.

In oversimplified terms, this is about the stage that Microsoft started to stumble. Tying the Web browser to the OS was a great move, but badly executed. Had Microsoft allowed any rendering engine to be used (or not) instead of the IE-powered version, the entire anti-trust process might have been avoided.

I’d like to think that Google is a good company. I’d like to believe it can be the exception to the rule.

The problem is, there are so many companies that prove the rule.