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lawsuit if the company pursued an ad deal with Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), saying the arrangement would likely be bad for consumers. Google and Yahoo walked away from the deal.

Now Obama's antitrust chief, Christine Varney, is expected to get even tougher: Several months before her appointment, she hinted that Google might be the subject of antitrust scrutiny, à la Microsoft.

"Google is in a position to pick the winners in just about every web-based market," says antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, who is part of the charge against Google Book Search. And, he adds, "it can do it without anyone even knowing."

Mapquest, which, like Fortune, is owned by a unit of Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500), a company that competes and cooperates with Google on many fronts. Mapquest was hurt by premium placement of Google's own map service when users did location searches. Adds Reback: "The only protection a web business has is competition in the search market."

Google agrees, and says its search competitors are always "one click away." But in many instances there simply are no emerging online rivals. Consider Google's effort to create a worldwide digital library. Varney is investigating the plan, even though the company has largely hammered out the terms of a digital library with publishers. Perhaps emboldened by the antitrust scrutiny, many authors and universities now fret about a monopoly controlling the world's books -- and the vast amount of information about readers that it could amass.

"Google will know what pages you read and how often you read it," says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented authors in the settlement with Google. "Google has come out with a policy saying it promises to protect our privacy, but it doesn't have any specific commitments -- it's pretty thin gruel."

Google's search engines regularly amass a huge quantity of information on American citizens. If you use Gmail to tell a friend about your upcoming ski trip, you might be surprised (and pleased, or not) to see ads for ski resorts popping up on your screen. If you use Google maps to pinpoint your location on a friend's porch in Tennessee, Nashville restaurant ads may pop up. Google responds to privacy concerns by noting that this is not human spying, but an automatic software scan (similar to a virus filter) that delivers relevant rather than random ads to users.

The Orwellian nature of Google's power -- its main business advantage -- is now starting to freak out some people. "Your search habits are the closest thing we have to mind reading," says Christopher Calabrese, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, who worries about the extent to which the government can force Google to share search records or other information.

Under federal law the government and law enforcement can use a warrant to compel Google to hand over e-mail messages sent less than 181 days earlier. Anything older requires a subpoena, and no one knows how often Gmail content is subpoenaed. "They're collecting a lot of information, and it's insufficiently protected by current law," Calabrese adds.

Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virginia, is mulling legislation that would regulate online advertising. The Federal Trade Commission is also informally reviewing behavioral advertising practices by Google and others in the industry.

When lawmakers, opponents, or journalists start to ask questions about Google's motives in Washington or the marketplace -- something that's happening more and more -- Google executives almost always imply, ever so gently, that the questioner is being cynical. (Google executives rarely get defensive.)

Eric Schmidt recently suggested to a group of reporters that Google's culture was the strong hand that kept it from engaging in anticompetitive behavior: &qu

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