"Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.
In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.
Are they getting hurt? I guess not. No one has any right to Google services[0]. Google has every right to refuse service to anyone[0]. What if they decided to close shop altogether?
Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.
When a company has an almost complete monopoly and they decide to bar someone from service, how is that not hurting them?
If you run a website that earns revenue based on incoming users and Google cuts you off, how is that not damaging you? You could use every single competitor and still not even get a quarter as much traffic as Google.
If this is supposed to lead to the NAP, physical violence is not the only way a person's agency can be restricted or living quality can be reduced. (What I would define as "hurt" here)
I absolutely disagree. In Google's case, their service have become an integral part to using the internet - and the internet has become an integral part of daily life. So such a block would absolutely have consequences.
> Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.
Then it would as well be breach of contract to lock me out of the Play Store until I agreed to an updated ToS. Apparently this can still be done if the old ToS contains the right clauses. So I suspect the phone ban would work similarly.
Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.
Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.
It seems a bit ridiculous to call a multi-year investigation by the EU's anti-trust agency "calling in my friends", but ok.
The most severe thing they did was give retailers a hard choice: Either they only sell phones with Google's Android distribution (AOSP+Google Play) or they only sell phones with no-name AOSP distributions. They cannot sell both.
As missing out on the revenue from Google Play-based phones would be financially irresponsible, this choice had only one viable option: Not selling any other AOSP-based OS except Google's.
Therefore Google effectively made competing AOSP-based projects extremely hard to sell, regardless of their quality.