Google learned long ago that you can’t be huge and also be the ‘good guys’

Back in June 1998, The Onion wrote a piece with the headline “Just Six Corporations Remain”. It poked fun at MCI-WorldCom, which would officially launch a merger a few months later. Walmart and Starbucks were beginning to dominate the landscape, both physically and figuratively, and it seemed like big business was eating the world, even with the first wave of dotcoms gaining fast.

It was in this climate that Sergey Brin and Larry ...