Is Google becoming the king of the Web? Well, duh — that happened about five years ago, before anyone really noticed. But activist groups, now and again, worry about whether Google knows too much about us. Yesterday, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson quizzes Google CEO Eric Schmidt about whether his company is doing enough to guard our privacy.

You have to admire how Schmidt bats the question aside: Google engineers have thought long and hard about this, and concluded that protecting users' privacy would make pages load too slowly. What he doesn't mention is that this is a problem because the slower pages load, the fewer Web searches we make; and the fewer Web searches we make, the fewer ads Google can sell. Google could make the Web safe for our secrets, in other words — its whiz kids know exactly how to do it — but it would just take too long. The king has spoken.

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