This weekend Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, contributed an op-ed for The New York Times about the company’s book-scanning project. In “A Library to Last Forever,” he writes:

Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.

Last May, Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library, wrote “A Book Grab by Google” for The Washington Post attacking Google’s proposed legal settlement in obtaining the right to digitize books. A key paragraph from Kahle reads:

We’ve wrestled with high-tech monopolies in the past — IBM, AT&T, Microsoft. The lesson was that such strongholds restrict innovation and competition. In those cases, the courts stepped in to address the inequities. Now, we have a proposal for monopolies to be created by the courts.

Cosimo publisher Alexander Dake echoes Kahle:

People should consider whether they want a future where genes in our food are owned by a private company, financial services only provided by one or two mega-banks, their political choices limited to one party, and the world’s historic archives controlled by one, albeit positively intended, search engine; or rather have multi-party democracies, a truly free market where many smaller companies provide a wide variety of services and products, and public goods not monopolized by giant corporations? That is the question, and the answer seems pretty obvious.