[HALtheWise]

When I worked at Google as an intern, there were lots of people internally that were very aware that most of their core products don't have a locked in monopoly like Amazon, Facebook, or Apple do. For example, after the Cambridge Analytica stuff, lots of people wanted to leave Facebook, but mostly aren't able to due to network effects. In contrast, using Bing instead of Google Search is so easy that I do so occasionally when I'm having trouble finding something through Google. If their product was suddenly worse than the competition, they could lose their entire user base in days, because the network effects of personalized search are nowhere near the network effects of Facebook. The same is true for Maps, Gmail (data export is allowed), Drive, Photos, Chrome, Ads (for websites) and most of their other core products. I guess the question of whether they "are a monopoly" is largely dependent on what your definition of monopoly is, but the lack of lock-in means they aren't able to exploit their market dominance in most of the ways that traditionally make monopolies problematic. Google Play / Android is a good example where this is less true, although alternate Android app stores and OS's do exist (see Amazon's attempt to make Fire OS)