Walmart is the biggest company in the world. It has a wealth of detractors, including the site Wakeupwalmart dedicated to exposing the damaging effects it alleges Walmart has on its employees and their communities. The hit blog thepeopleofwalmart.

Walmart offers everything you could possibly want at prices too low to believe. A 2007 Fast Company article showed how Walmart even hurts its suppliers and manufacturers, often forcing those companies to choose between outsourcing their manufacturing or seeing their products pulled off the most lucrative shelves in America. One blog (with the initials WIPE) goes so far as to say that Walmart is pure evil.

According to one of their founding principles (Don’t be evil), Google should be on the opposite end of the spectrum. And by the look of their home page, the Google name floating in a sea of white space, bears no resemblance to the big, multifaceted explosion of stuff people associate with Walmart.

But in the virtual world, Google owns a market share comparable to Walmart’s stranglehold on the brick-and-mortar universe. 64.6% of online searches are conducted through Google (Aug. 2009, Nielsen) YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, is unrivaled in the world of online video (its 7 billion+ streams outrank the next most popular rival by . . . almost 7 billion). When Google acquired DoubleClick, it doubled its hold on the online advertising market to a whopping 69%, according to this report.  And Gmail is now the 3rd largest web-based email service in the U.S. The Internet giant has a firm grip on existing markets, but its pushing to take over even more.

Google Voice is heading to our phones, threatening to change the way we manage our contacts, and threatening the phone industry, according to AT&T, who filed a complaint with the FCC accusing Google of compromising the neutrality of their services. And Google Wave may wind up competing with almost everything, social media, IM, wiki, email, time will tell how many markets get dominated by that innovation.

And now we’re awaiting next Wednesday’s official announcement of Google’s latest venture, a music search feature with the working title “One Box.”  Bringing music streaming into mainstream search brings Google’s influence into a music industry that is already desperate to recover from the devastation brought by the Internet and the impossible problem of digital rights management.  Google’s partnership with streaming and purchasing services iLike and Lala could put a dent in Apple’s iTunes market share in the digital music realm.

The Google expansion goes on and on. Wikipedia’s list of current Google products for desktop and mobile devices, along with Web-based tools in advertising, communication, development, mapping, search, and statistics, includes over 130 distinct products. And most of these tools and services are available for free or at very low costs.

Google is getting dangerously close to offering everything you could possibly want online at prices too low to be true. At what point do the ramifications start to resemble the Walmart effect? The answer could be frightening.

As Google accumulates more and more control of the online market, it could become more difficult for startups, small tech companies, and even titans like Yahoo! to stay afloat. No company can compete with free, nor can any online entity boast the reach and influence of Google. Add to that the sheer volume of information Google can harvest from its users, and you have a company with more knowledge and power than one company should have. In fact, Google recently agreed to adjust their privacy policy in response to some of the negative backlash over just how closely they were watching their users.

Evil or not, Google’s success could spell the doom of a lot of companies and a lot of jobs. That’s because Google is contributing to an Internet culture in which making money is often perceived as the enemy. For example, the newspaper industry is quickly crumbling, they lost $7.5 billion in ad revenue in 2008. The public gets irate at the mention of paying for online news. Google surely isn’t to blame for the collapse, but their business model certainly helps to sustain the problem behind it.

Given the integration that Google Wave makes possible, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that Google could revolutionize the way a lot of online industries work, including job search. How long before someone uses Wave to add CareerBuilder’s high-powered functionality for users to Craigslist’s bare-bones rates for employers? It might be great for the end user, but will it unravel the economy of Internet business in the process?

It’s great to get excited about the wonderful things Google is doing. And it’s hard to blame anyone for looking for inexpensive/free tools online. But if we as end users aren’t careful to diversify our use of these tools to more than just the Googleverse, and if we aren’t willing to pay (or even donate) for the cool tech wizardry we use, the complexion of the tech industry could get ugly. Thepeopleofgoogle.com might not be that far away.

What do you think? Is Google the Wal-Mart Of The Web?

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