Usually these cases start when a would-be competitor accuses the monopolist of taking anti-competitive actions. First step would be to review these accusations, if they exists.

Speculating whether they "might do something" without specifics seems fruitless.

The 1999 "Findings of Facts" in the US vs MS case should give a good idea of what is needed. It is quite readable, written in plain language, and totally ignored by the pundits who commented the case at the time.

A copy can be found here: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/findfact.html

If we want to accuse Google of taking anti-competitive actions, we have to at least decide what those actions are.

It'd have to be something like AdSense click-thru rates affecting search positions.

If there was a causation, then if you want higher SERPs, you'd need to use AdSense over competing ad providers. Essentially, using their monopoly in Search to be anti-competitive in text-ads.

I wonder if anybody has done such a test already...

Subsidizing Mozilla to be the default search engine in firefox ?

If they are they're certainly being discreet about it. Microsoft was obviously anti-competitive in the 90's. The Windows/IE bundling thing was only a small part of it.

All of their software was designed to lock you in. It could sometimes be difficult to use a Microsoft product without having to use others. It can be a hassle to buy a new PC without Windows, but you couldn't do it at all back then. After the OS/2 fiasco they screwed IBM on Windows 95 pricing. Other OEM's were getting it for a few bucks and IBM had to pay retail initially.

It does concern me when one company dominates a market the way Google does and I think we need to keep a very close eye on them, but I don't see anything anti-competitive about what they're doing yet. In fact, they typically go out of their way to be open to the point where some of their applications allow you to move your data to a competitor's application.

That said, Microsoft, just like Google now, built their monopoly with a better product. It wasn't until much later that they became slimy.

Speaking of moving my data, is there a way for me to migrate out of Gmail? I read an interview (Playboy interview with the Google founders - http://kottke.org/plus/misc/google-playboy.html) where Larry Page specifically said:

'For example, we just released Gmail, a free e-mail service. We said, “We will not hold your e-mail hostage.” We will make it possible for you to get your e-mail out of Gmail if you ever want to.'

But I haven't actually figured out how to do that yet. Does anyone know?

Yeah, just setup the pop3 account and download it. I think you export your contacts as vcards - even if not most of your contacts should be right there in your email.

I fire up thunderbird everyonce in a while to basically backup my emails because of those horror stories of people losing all their email or even access to the account

Cool, thanks.

I extracted every email from Gmail a while back. It took a few hours, but now I have local backups. I just used imap and moved things to a local imap server.

gmail has pop and imap. what more do you want

You try to compete with them and see what happens...

If you are aware of some, point them out. In Microsoft's case, they are known, proven and verifiable.