Days after the DoubleClick transaction, Microsoft and AT amp;T publicly called on federal regulators to block the deal, saying it would reduce competition and give Google access to too much private data. Sorrell called on regulators to review the acquisition, declaring, “It raises issues as to whether we are happy to let Google have our clients’ data and our own data, which Google could use for its own purposes.” A senior executive at Time Warner, who did not want to be identified because its AOL division is a Google partner, told me at the time, “You always have to worry when someone gets so much more powerful than all the competition out there. This is why I come down to this: I hope the government starts understanding this power sooner rather than later.”

Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University and a former Supreme Court clerk, looks at the issue from a different angle. He said he’s not “worried about Google becoming large.” One can make the argument, for example, that size brings standardization, he said. “I’m less concerned how they’re behaving in their own market than what a company does to other markets.” Will Google use its power to unfairly dominate other markets, as Microsoft used its operating system dominance to cripple the Netscape browser? “If Google remains true to its mission of being an ‘honest broker,’ I’m pleased. If they have an agenda, that’s when I become fearful.” He wasn’t sure Google had an agenda, but was plainly worried: “If they’re willing to block sites to placate China, are they willing to block sites to placate powerful advertisers?”

Here the issue of privacy becomes entwined with the issue of power. Together, Google and DoubleClick amass a mountain of consumer data. The more “personalized” this data, as Eric Schmidt said, the better the search answers. “When I decide to go to the movies,” said Schmidt, “I’d like to rely on the recommendations of friends. How do we capture that? The more we know who you are, the more we can tailor the search results.”

Of course, when a company retains as much data as Google does and also proclaims, “We are in the advertising business,” as Eric Schmidt does, this arouses more privacy concerns. And since Google believes advertising is information users want if it is“relevant,” it follows that sharing data serves users, which exacerbates these fears. Or as Sergey Brin told Wall Street analysts during Google’s third-quarter conference call in October 2007, “I am really excited to tell you today what we have done over the past quarter in ads and apps. As you all know, for advertising our real philosophy is to create a win-win between advertisers and customers by presenting users with really relevant information which is interesting to them, but is likely to cause a transaction to commence.” With technology making inroads toward improving how users’ real desires are gauged and finding patterns of behavior, the data-mining discipline Sergey Brin studied at Stanford enters a new age. The pressures on Google-and all sellers of advertising-to share more data will intensify.

Privacy fears escalate when Google executives express peculiar ideas about privacy-ideas that suggest they don’t grasp the reasons people are fearful. Each fall, Google hosts a two-day Zeitgeist Conference on its Mountain View campus, inviting a cross section of people from various fields. Much of the conference is moderated by journalist James Fallows, and a cavalcade of prominent scientists, musicians, artists, public officials, and others make presentations or appear on panels. The last event of Google’s Zeitgeist is when Brin and Page come on stage-in jeans, of course-to answer Fallows’s and the audience’s questions. At the 2007 conference, Randall Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau rose to ask Brin to access the importance of privacy.

Brin declared that “the number one” privacy issue was “stuff that is untrue about people on the Web.” Because information “travels so fast” online, and because “anyone can publish anything,” these untruths gain currency. The number two privacy issue, he said, was the “hijacking of credit cards.” He dismissed concern about the information collected on cookies “as more of the Big Brother type”-in other words, fantasies. “Do they [users] trust what you’re doing? That’s not so much a privacy issue.” By this logic, if we trust Google, there is little reason to fear they will misuse our data. Afterward, at a small press lunch with the founders and Schmidt, Page signaled his agreement with Brin. “Sergey is just saying there are practical privacy issues that are different than the ones debated.” As was true when the founders pushed to add a delete button and allow Google’s Gmail scanning technology to more aggressively deliver ads when users typed certain keywords and to forgo a delete button-a mistake Brin told me showed “we just weren’t good” at anticipating fears, but “I think we’ve now learned”-once again, Brin and Page displayed an inability to imagine why anyone would question their motives and a deafness to fears that can’t easily be quantified.

While a full chorus of incensed media-advertising agencies, publishers, newspapers, television and telephone companies, and tech companies like Microsoft-complained about the growing power of Google, the Bush administration, steadfast in its belief that a free market provides its own regulation, was silent. Stepping into this breach was Brooklyn-born public interest advocate Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, D.C. Chester founded this two-person organization with an annual budget of two hundred thousand dollars in 2001. He has mounted a ferocious campaign to induce the world’s governments to handcuff Google. Its first petition was filed before the FTC in the fall of 2006, prodding them to investigate how online marketing encroaches on privacy. In the spring of 2007, Chester, then sixty-two, began to press for an antitrust investigation of the rapid consolidation of the online advertising sector, and urged the FTC to reject Google’s proposed merger with DoubleClick. He petitioned the European Commission to do the same.

A voracious reader of trade publications, Chester became obsessed by what he saw as the pernicious power of the Internet to compile data on consumers. Chester is difficult to ignore. His Brooklyn-accented voice is loud and piercing. He hounds people. He speaks passionately and rapidly, leaping in midsentence from privacy to monopoly to a conversation he had that morning with an FTC staffer. He wears horn-rims and short-sleeved shirts with the neck open and the pockets bristling with pens. His tiny office on Connecticut Avenue is adorned with movie posters that assail McCarthyism and corporate power. He has little regard for the advertising industry, but knows that if he railed against commercialism and consumerism it would open him up to attack as a left-wing former social worker, which, of course, he is. So he sticks to the privacy issue. “The basic model for interactive advertising,” he said, “combines this very powerful data-collection business designed to know your interests in a daily, updated way that is then utilized to create very powerful multimedia to get you to behave in some fashion, whether it’s buying a product or liking a brand.”

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, rents a single office to Chester ’s organization and works just down the hall. He is in nearly all ways Chester ’s opposite. He wears charcoal business suits and has degrees in law and computer science; no pens can be found in his shirt pockets. But he and Chester work closely together to advance privacy protection measures. Rotenberg believes the central question should not be, Is Google invading people’s privacy? Rather, it should be, Why does Google need to collect all of this information?