Actually no, not at all. Many companies give away free email, software, etc. Google just has a very strong gripe on web search which allows them to control the market on web advertising. Their gripe on the market allows them to higher the best programmers in the world. If the EU attacks Google and forces them to charge for everything or split up their software divisions it will basically be an attack on the internet and technology. It would end all free email, free software incentives, etc. Basically cause massive harm to the internet as we know it.

Only thing Google could be found guilty of is tax evasion. 

they were probably comparing Chrome 6 to ie9. Chrome 7 and 8 destroys ie9. FireFox 4 destroys ie9.

I don't visit many college campuses in the US so I can't argue that...bit I do find you calling people who use IE as internet-ignorant pretty ignorant in its own right.

I use Firefox and IE8 depending on what I want to do at work and at home and IE does basic browsing fine. If you want to diddle in temper data or firebug, then Firefox is for you...

They don't. It's us users who are giving them control. Bing, Yahoo, etc all could have bigger markets if we used them. But we don't. Why? because while Bing has better results then Google, for some reason we all seem to favor Google over everyone else.

I don't, I use W7 rather than Apple's trash. And I only use Linux if I need to run a server pretty much as Windows Server 2008 R2 sucks compared to Linux in stability.

But actually, I know what they were comparing because I've seen that benchmark.

Here is a bit more up-to-date comparison (which is far from really up-to-date as F4 is at beta 9 now.)

http://www.favbrowser.com/html5-internet-explorer-9-ie9-vs-google-chrome-8-vs-firefox-4-vs-opera-11-vs-safari-5/

Clearly I don't hate MS, as I'm a big Windows 7 fan, and a big 360 gamer (almost 11,000 gamerscore now ^_^). That said, you're write, that didn't read the way I meant it to. I appologize for the tone of the statement. 

I mean there is a generation of people who use IE because they just don't know anything else, nor pay any attention to anything else. I didn't mean it to read as you have to be ignorant to use IE. Obviously this is not true, I just meant a large portion of the current IE base uses it solely because that's all they know or understand.  The younger generation (those who grew up in the 90s) are being taught to not use IE. Even some of us children of the 80s caught the end of the era of IE. As someone back in college, I have been to multiple universities and not found any which use IE in the last few years. 

Googles monopoly has nothing to do with their free tools...but more to do with data they are able to collect and the search monopoly they have.

By having search monopoly and pretty much knowing the exact number of people and demographics that go to every website, they can control the rates which advertises pay to advertise on sites. Not to mention the ad serving tools they use and own which are most compnly used ad servers (doubleclick) and whave data on pretty much every website out there. So they just know way too much about stuff they shouldn't have any information about...

Again, we gave them the monopoly. All search engines have their own data, which is similar to Google's in everyway, but since the frequency of users use Google versus everyone else their data is more concrete and certain than the others.

If you want to cut down on their monopoly, cut down using Google's search engine. Pretty simple.

reminds me of my old elementary school 14 years back. Computer lab was all Macs.

Good. IE is the worst of the big three browsers (FF, IE, Chrome). MS may have done a great job with the 360 and put together a fine OS in Windows 7 but their web browser still sucks.