> > and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy

;)

I would have been aghast if you had told me 30 years ago that by now our movements, purchases, letters, phone calls, photos, rolodex, walkman, television, and more would all be connected to a central database and used to produce models to coerce us into changing our behaviour.

Eh. One of the things Microsoft was actually punished for was bundling IE, and it didn't help that they were actually hostile to other browsers as proven by the fact that their documentation pages would work if Opera faked the IE headers.

Googles pushing of Chrome and disregard for other browsers across their web properties comes dangerously close in my opinion.

I think that Googles' push is even worse. Just think about how many possible devices Microsoft could target back in the days. 300-500 million devices maybe? Google not only invaded desktops in the past decades, but completely owns the Android platform, which comes bundled with Chrome and Google as the primary search engine. Desktops with Chrome plus the Android platform must be far more than 2-3 billion devices.