Google processes more than three billion search queries a day. It has altered our notions of privacy, tracking what we buy, what we search for online — and even our physical location at every moment of the day. Every business trying to reach mass-market consumer demand online knows that Google is the gatekeeper.

The fact that it is a monopoly, with an almost 90 percent share of the search advertising business, is a given that we have all come to accept. It’s Google’s world; we just live in it. So it matters how this company works — who it hires, who it fires and why.

When a company is dominant enough, it sets the tone for an entire era. In the fall of 1985, I was working as a vice president in the media mergers and acquisitions group at Merrill Lynch in Los Angeles. I would occasionally have to show up for a meeting at 5 a.m. in the Beverly Hills office of Drexel Burnham Lambert. I would do this because Mike Milken, the king of junk bonds at Drexel, would demand it — once the trading day started at 6:30 a.m., he was unavailable.

Executives were terrified that Drexel would start a raid on their companies. Politicians would seek Mr. Milken’s counsel and his money. His “who’s going to stop me?” attitude was the perfect libertarian credo for the Reagan era of deregulation. Drexel gave us culture, too — “Barbarians at the Gate,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street” telling us that “greed is good.” But Drexel flew too close to the sun. Mr. Milken went to prison and Drexel is no more.