[themacguffinman]

Right, but unless you are accusing Google of foul play, their market dominance is just evidence of the superior consumer value they provide. In other words, they are doing what is best for its customers.

The question of this thread is: did Google unfairly push out their competition. If you can't argue that, then this is just pointless Google hand wringing.

[ocdtrekkie]

This is actually untrue. It's not illegal to become a monopoly. It's illegal to be anticompetitive once you have that market dominance.

Google may have achieved it's dominance legally, however, it's conduct since then is illegal.

[themacguffinman]

I know it's not illegal to be a monopoly, that's actually my point. I was responding to the_mitsuhiko's complaints of Google monopoly in certain areas, to which I argue that Google's monopoly status isn't inherently a problem.

[ionised]

> their market dominance is just evidence of the superior consumer value they provide.

I don't think that's true.

They leveraged their search engine dominance to push Chrome on people with banners stating that the user experience would be better on Chrome.

They bundled the Chrome installer with a load of other app installers and users would immediately find themselves with a new, default browser, because Google knew most users never explore advanced installer options to discover they needed to opt-out.

Google maps is far worse than OSM and HereMaps in my opinion, but it is far more pervasive because it is the go-to mapping service when users perform a search.