[Daniel14]

"They're too entrenched with no viable competitor, and who's going to try to 'take on' google? Where would you start?"

I disagree. All their products have serious competitors people can switch to anytime: Search - Bing; Mail - Yahoo; Docs - Office; Blogger - Wordpress; Android - WP7; Chrome - FF; the list goes on and on. Google is facing heavy competition on all fronts, and only time will tell if they can step up to their game. (See http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/03/google-six-front-war/ for further information). But I like Google's attitude of creating lots and lots of new products, without being concerned about who they compete with, as they really seem to shake up the industry for the better wherever they enter.

Lastly, your last paragraph about "How would we know if they did something we disagreed with?" sounds pretty paranoid to me. If Google screws up we're going to find out very quickly). Google doesn't control the internet. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, traditional news etc. will make sure we'll find out about it, even if Google starts censoring their search results (which, admirably, they've completely refused to do in the past).