On its march to world domination, has Google come to a fork in the road and taken the corporate path most traveled? The one that leads a giant corporation to arrogance, monopolistic practices, disregard for competitors (and the welfare of whole industries), and just plain evilness?

    To many, Google's power and size have turned it into the old Microsoft, while the new Microsoft has become the poor underdog fighting the good fight against the Google monopoly. Google is abusing its power, poking its Snidely Whiplash nose into our personal Internet transgressions, monitoring our phone calls, stealing copyrighted books for its own gain, destroying the journalism business, censoring search results in China, and even dodging taxes in the UK.

    Enough hyperbole. Here are some facts. Well, OK, some actual opinions.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are reporting that a new Google phone being tested by employees may be one whose software is designed from the ground up by Google, and that it may be unlocked.

TechCrunch has been following Google twitterers and their friends who are saying things like:

“Supposedly, Google employees were given tons of these phones today. unlocked,”

Earthlink has been having trouble making money lately. It's abandoning municipal wi-fi efforts to focus on "more profitable" businesses.

Earthlink can't figure out how to run the businesses it has. After years of great DSL service from Covad, I decided to switch to earthlink for phone and DSL because it's cheaper. I was hoping this was still a decent entrepreneurial company, not a jaded loser like the monopolistic telcos.

I was wrong. My service has been spotty. A week ago, the phone line suddenly went screwy, full of static. The static comes and goes, and is so bad that I can rarely get a DSL signal through it.

I went to tech support, and they spent hours getting me to unplug and plug in lines, cycle the modem, etc. Finally they agreed to send out a technician. But I had to wait two days.

I came across an interesting company at a Web Ventures conference and wrote about it. Several people have given their own feedback. Funding Universe offers a site for entrepreneurs to help them get funding. I've long felt that with the death of publications like Red Herring and Upside, there's a dearth of good resources for entrepreneurs. The new Red Herring, relaunched under new ownership, does not focus on entrepreneurs any more, which I think it should do.

Funding Universe offers weekly chats with angel investors, archives of documents that help educate you through the funding process, a service that rates your business plan as often as you like, the ability to upload documents and video for VCs to see, events with potential funders and consultations with funding experts. Most of the services are offered for a fee.

A reviewer on Huffington Post thinks my book on Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not have "greater skepticism toward the self-proclaimed ethical motivations of Google's founders." http://bit.ly/6HAJrsI rather expected this. I'm generally a skeptical reporter, and was dismayed myself that I couldn't be more critical.

              Ken Auletta's new book, “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It,” is out. I'm just starting to read it, and I'm sure it's very good. 

I was looking through the New York Times online this morning, when I noticed something unusual. Off to the right there was a large box with an animated slide show. 

First it shows the Google logo, then a search box with blinking cursor. Then the words "Now Playing," which switches to "Search Stories" To that last frame, the Google logo is added, then the "Play" arrow.

 Is Google, the company that refuses to show big, animated ads on its own site, creating such ads itself to muck up other sites?

Yes. I clicked on the play button, which took me to a YouTube video -- an animated ad for Google's search engine. It looks like a response to Microsoft's ads mocking Google as giving too many search results, claiming Bing is a "Decision engine."

Google just loves shaking up any industry that that screws up the process of getting people online. It tried to kick-start free municipal wi-fi a few years ago by setting one up for the city of Mountain View and TRYING to do the same in San Francisco (greedy SF supervisors managed to kill the plan by trying to get Google to up its offer to pay SF $1 million for the privilege of giving SF free Internet access. Supervisor John Daly opposed the plan just because mayor Gavin Newsom was in favor of it.)

Now it's trying to demonstrate to airports that they should offer free wi-fi. According to an article in PC World:

"Hoping to bring holiday cheer to harried travelers, Google is footing the bill for Wi-Fi access at 47 U.S. airports through mid-January, so that people can connect free to the Internet while they wait at airline gates and other areas."

When did the Google Android phone become the Droid? Guess I'm not cool enough to keep up with the lingo.

Whatever. PCWorld ran an article by Tony Bradley on the battery life of the new Droid from Motorola running on the Verizon network. He says that PC World senior editor Robert Strohmeyer braved the lines at the Verizon store, took one home, charged it up and went to work. It died before he got home. He says it never keeps a charge past 7PM.

The problem seems to be for heavy users who tap so many of those neat apps available. With some people using smartphones instead of PCs, this could be a problem.

However, Rob Jackson at the fan site Phandroid put it through his own test, using a lot of power: