Should Uncle Sam smash Google?

Aside from all its brilliant work transforming the internet, Google will make more mistakes, invade our privacy a little, be a bit of a bully, and generally act like a big-shoes monopolist over the next few years.

So what should the US government do about its latest errant corporate citizen?

Nothing.

Technology is uncontrollable, and always takes us in directions we least expect.

And immediate history teaches us that innovation and the free market succeed where government lawsuits fail.

On June 8, 2000, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered that Microsoft be cleaved in two. The court-ordered breakup was the climax of a multiyear US Justice Department lawsuit … but not quite. Microsoft was able to string out the appeals process until the Bush administration was installed in the year, and the quest to breakup the world’s largest software company quietly dropped.

Many saw Judge Jackson's ultimate failure as a calamity for the computer industry. Microsoft – then the world’s largest company by market capitalisation – would continue to leverage its desktop PC dominance to seize control of the internet and, well, more or less every bit of software on the planet.

One computer magazine editor (heck, me) did point out at the time that Penfield should never have been let off the leash. Two decades previously, the US government had targeted another IT behemoth, IBM, whose mainframe and minicomputers had gained a seemingly unbreakable stranglehold on business computing.

That antitrust suit failed. But history records that IBM was soon knocked off its perch regardless. And not another “big iron” computer maker like Digital, Hitachi or Fujitsu, but by a college drop-out called Bill Gates, whose start-up company sold software (originally bankrolled, ironically, by IBM) that pushed a whole new class of computer, the desktop PC and sever, into the business world then beyond.

And now, of course, less than a decade after Penfield’s ruling, Microsoft – while still one of the planet’s great cash machines – is in a fight for its life against Google, which came from nowhere to gain a wide lead in the areas that matter today: internet search, cloud computing, open source development and software-as-a-service. Once again, the game has been turned on its head in a way no-one predicted, with the lucrative software licenses of the past replaced by ad-funded services.

The organisation that will smash Google is already out there. But it’s not the Justice Department. It’s a couple of guys sitting in a garage, dreaming up the next big thing – just as Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin were doing 10 years ago, as Judge Thomas Penfield began his investigation into Microsoft.

Not that being on the side of the angels will necessarily help Google as it faces its first heavy duty threat from Justice.

Microsoft may have ultimately beaten back Judge Jackson, but the distraction and stress of the antitrust case took a heavy toll, and Gates never regained the Master of the Universe mojo he enjoyed in the early to mid-90s.

Conversely, even when the government wins, things don’t always stay won.

Famously, in 1982, a successful Department of Justice antitrust action saw the breakup of national carrier AT&T. But under the recent, laissez faire reign of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Michael Powell (son of the more famous Colin, incidentally), the regional "Baby Bells" created by the mandatory separation have re-coagulated this decade in a series of mergers that have created a new nation-wide carrier ... called AT&T.