Bloomberg has been rooting around the historical quotes of Christine Varney, Barack Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's antitrust division, and found a doozy from eight months ago calling Google a "monopoly in Internet online advertising" that could spell trouble for the US economy.

What's more she said that Google's gathering market power in cloud computing could lead to a "repeat of Microsoft." She foresees the day when companies complain that Google won't let them interoperate with Google's product.

She made these observations last June at an American Antitrust Institute panel discussion where she reportedly advocated aggressive antitrust enforcement to curb the conduct of dominant companies.

Ms Varney ought to know a monopoly when she sees one. She was one of Netscape's outside lawyers and lobbied the government to sue Microsoft back in the day. Now she regards Microsoft as "so last century. They are not the problem."

She'll give Google this: it's a lawful monopoly, but being labeled a monopoly is losing half the battle. Ask Bill Gates who resisted that mantle like it was a leper's cloak.

You'll recall that the DOJ under the Bush administration stopped Google's deal with Yahoo by threatening to sue for antitrust.

Varney herself professed to be "deeply troubled" by Google's acquisition of DoubleClick. Ditto its Yahoo deal before it was killed in the cradle.