How the tech titan plans to argue that it’s not a monopoly.

Three times in the last month, government agencies have targeted Google (GOOG) for antitrust reviews. An outstanding private lawsuit alleges that Google tried to kill a business-to-business search engine with predatory pricing. And during the waning months of the Bush administration, soon-to-be Obama antitrust chief Christine Varney declared that Google "has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising." Last month she asserted that the Bush administration had been too lax in combating monopolistic behavior and that the Obama Justice Department would no longer "stand on the sidelines."

The above should explain why Dana Wagner, a former Department of Justice antitrust lawyer hired by Google just last year, is rapidly becoming one of the company's public faces. Along with Adam Kovacevich, a company public-policy spokesman, Wagner has been giving talks to advertising clients, public officials, reporters, and academics in an effort to diffuse the impression that Google has a competition law problem.

As might be expected, Google's presentation highlights the company's many good works and "don't be evil" corporate philosophy. But there's another element at the front and center of the presentation: According to Warner and Kovacevich, their company holds only a 2.66 percent share of its total market.

If that number seems low for the runaway corporate success story of the Internet age, Google wants you to believe that it's just a question of market definition. Google rejects the idea that it's in the search advertising business, an industry in which it holds more than a 70 percent share of revenue. Instead, the company says that its competition is all advertising, a category broad enough to include newspaper, radio, and highway billboards. Google's argument isn't just that it's not a big bully. If you believe the company, it's not even that big.

"We need to move past intuitive market definitions and actually look at how consumers, advertisers, and publishers are shifting their spending," Wagner says. "Market definition is job one, and hopefully people aren't bringing too many preconceived notions to that."

At first glance, this seems like a tough position to defend. There's a sharp difference between how companies use mass-market tools like billboards and how they use search-based advertising, which targets consumers far closer to the point of sale. Likewise, there's strong if not uniform precedent in media law that different mediums—say, radio and television—aren't interchangeable. And even if you buy Google's claim that the lines between mediums have been blurred by technology, it's still hard to explain how the company could maintain a 30 percent operating margin, despite money-losing outlays in a host of adjacent fields, if it faced serious competition. As Wagner himself notes, arguing that Google's market is broader than search advertising isn't intuitive. When Microsoft tried to argue that it didn't have a monopoly in the 1990s, that strategy was widely seen as disingenuous.