[jonas21]

Water companies are usually granted a legal monopoly to serve an area because it would be a logistical nightmare to have a bunch of companies all trying to install and service their own pipes. In exchange, they're required to serve everyone in the area and to charge regulated rates.

If another water company wanted to come in and install pipes to your house, they would be prohibited from doing so.

Other search engines aren't prohibited from competing with Google -- in fact many countries actively encourage and fund local competitors -- so I don't see how this analogy makes sense.

[scotty79]

Some monopolies are granted, some occur naturally. Example of the likes of Microsoft Bing shows that Google monopoly is even stronger than if it was written into law.

Maybe monopolies should have their products strictly regulated regardless of how they came to be monopolies?

Other way to deal with monopolies is just force them to split up into few companies, but I don't think that users would benefit much from having 10 different search engines to choose from same way they don't need their browser to have 10 different homepages. They need just one, but the one that provides results that they need. Same way like they need one water provider that provides the water of quality that they need.

If you allow Google just to show results from whoever pays the most, that only shows that they are sitting on the bridge and let pass through only the ones that pay the most, no matter how much value their passing brings to everybody else. At some point nobody cares if they built this bridge or not. Their bridge stands on and occupies optimal spot for a bridge so people on both sides of the bridge should and have every right to fight for such agreement that benefits them most, not just the bridge owner/constructor.