The search wars continue to heat up. Just days after Google complained that it wasn't fair that Microsoft wanted to use its own search engine in the next version of IE (imagine that), Amazon's A9 search engine has dumped Google as the backend and switched to Microsoft's MSN Search. This article notes that Google has already "complained informally" about how unfair that is.
Apparently Google's notion of fairness is that everyone and every company should be required to use Google, period. Uh huh. That's fair.
What's bad for users is that we have seen consolidation in search, to the point that there are only a handful of viable and useful search sites, each of which seems determined to seek every monopolistic advantage they can grasp, instead of actually trying to offer good search services. A two tier Internet would only make this worse, because only the big companies could afford to pay the blackmail, er, I mean the "enhanced performance" fees of companies like SBC/AT&T and Verizon.