Sergey Brin nervous about Microsoft's bid for Yahoo

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, said Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is unnerving. He said if Microsoft is left to purchase Yahoo, they will force the customers to use more Microsoft products and limit others.

Sergey Brin made the comments after an event at Google’s headquarters for the Google Lunar X Prize, a race to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon. Brin said at the meeting:

The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies, and when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that’s unnerving.”

Critics say if Microsoft purchases Yahoo, they will make their email domains the defaults in operating systems like they did with Internet Explorer (which led to Netscape death). With this, they will dominate the operating system and Web space, critics fear. Google has already issued concern in the past of Microsoft's newest operating system Windows Vista, which uses Microsoft's Live search as default. While Google cannot control whether Microsoft will purchase Yahoo or not, they are raising doubts to regulators who may put a block on a Microsoft/Yahoo merger. When Microsoft originally announced their plans to buy Yahoo, David Drummond, Senior Vice President of Google, said that this merger will stifle innovation:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”

Usually Google doesn’t worry about other company mergers, but in this case, they seem to worry a lot. If Microsoft does go ahead and buy Yahoo, with their increased total number of users, it will really hurt Google in search and ad markets.