The New York Times recently ran an article titled, “Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big” about how the Internet search engine is facing increasing antitrust scrutiny.

It’s true Google is pushing up toward a 70 percent share of search engine traffic, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a monopoly. Now, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t pretend to be one, but it sure seems to me that this situation is a far cry from the break up of AT&T or Standard Oil.

With the AT&T monopoly case, consumers had no other choice. Either you got your phone service through AT&T or you had no phone service. It was virtually the same when it came to gasoline.

But on the Internet, you have free choice. You can go to Google for a clean, simple interface. You can go to Yahoo! to find a busier, more intricate Web portal. There are some smaller search engines that are designed differently such as Cuil or more targeted engines such as Technorati, (which is essentially a blog search engine). There’s still Yellowpages.com. There’s a wealth of specific search engines that get traffic and provide useful information to all kinds of people.

The strength of Google is it has (by far) the vastest index. There’s no question about that. So, Google has far more information to draw upon to create its results. Google just works harder to get more data into its index than the other search engines do. They are so vast that they actually feed results to many of the other search engines such as Ask, Netscape and AOL.

Some may use that as an argument that Google is getting too big, but if AOL suddenly couldn’t use Google’s search results, AOL does have alternatives. Most of those who “enhance” their search through Google can’t build the kind of infrastructure that Google has. The curve to get there is just too huge. And it’s not as if a company such as AOL is dependent on Google to make money off searches. AOL has its own pay-per-click system. It has its own independent revenue stream.

For the average, everyday searcher, the choice chiefly comes down to quality of results and the look/feel of the search engine.

Google doesn’t have a lot of fluff. You go to Google.com and you’re presented with a white page and a search box. You search. You get results. It’s what it is, and that’s appealing to many. On the front page of Yahoo! there’s a big splashy Toyota ad that some will find distracting. There are countless little buttons for Yahoo! Messenger, puzzles, horoscopes, news headlines, travel, music, personals, etc. It’s a very different site with a different personality from Google. Some like that one-stop shopping; others can’t stand all the “noise.” But there clearly is a choice.

We’ll just have to wait and see if the U.S. Justice Department agrees.