There's a fuzziness to the concept of monopoly. It doesn't have to mean the absolute version where no alternatives exist at all. It can (and legally does) mean that a business is so dominant that it can effectively dictate the terms of the market.
Google has a search monopoly effective enough that they can solely make or break anyone who relies on search. They have enough dominance in the market that if they were to choose to delete something from search results, it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market who cannot at all get by on the tiny fraction of traffic they get from other sources.
This is not the case for all areas of search, but it's the case for enough of them that the concerns about Google's monopoly are valid.
As a simple example of this, let us imagine for a minute that Amazon and Google go to war. Google drops all search results that point to Amazon products or products in the Amazon marketplace and direct those searches to competitors and competing marketplaces. Google also changes Chrome so that entries into the url bar that are not explicitly for amazon domains do not match or return any amazon domain or product.
Since "Google is not a monopoly" I am sure no one would have a problem with this behavior... :)
That's not a simple example, that's an exceptional poor example. That's like talking about a world with a railroad monopoly and a steel monopoly and discussing what happens if they have a war at their intersection. That's not the point at all.
Google does NOT have a monopoly on searching for the sorts of products you buy on Amazon. In that particular exceptional case, a lot of people do go straight to Amazon for the search.
I use DuckDuckGo myself. The issue isn't that no alternatives exist (if that were the case, it would be much clearer that Google had a plain and simple monopoly). The issue is that Google can unilaterally kill or make other businesses through their search. For example, they can use their search dominance to push everyone into Chrome in order to kill Firefox (even as they pay Mozilla and Apple to keep Google as default search).
Google's search dominance is under threat from competition, but they do enough anti-competitive stuff to keep their dominance that it's an issue.
Maybe a big step would be just to block Google from paying Apple and others to make Google the default. I don't know. Probably the more impactful would be to separate the Google search business from the Android stuff. The benefit Google has from tying those two together makes it really so much harder for competition to gain ground.
If you want a pretty neutral balanced view of the issues of anti-trust, Planet Money did a good little series on how overreach in the past led to excessive caution and underreaction now.
> The issue is that Google can unilaterally kill or make other businesses through their search.
I don't see how this answers my statement. Of course they can, it's their platform. I'm sure MS pushes their new browser on bing. There's another thread open today where people have listed a ton of alternates so one can de-google. I did it 2 years ago, it's been fine. Apple Maps is much better than it used to be, bing is better than it used to be. Lots of email options.
I'm not saying it's a clear conclusion that Google has a monopoly that must be regulated/broken-up. I'm saying that it's not conclusive. The case is strong enough to seriously consider and to evaluate. I think the duopoly of iOS/Android is probably the most serious issue, even more than search. But none of this is simple cut-and-dry.
So for search they are not a monopoly, not even close.
For iOS/Android, I'm not seeing a problem just because they are popular. Is there some specific legislation you would like passed which would interfere and most likely overreach into their companies?
Like you said, it's not cut and dry because there isn't a monopoly. If an upstart company came along and wanted to make a new mobileOS, I wish them well. If Google or Apple did something wrong to interfere with their success, bring a suit at that time with specific claims.
Google has a search monopoly effective enough that they can solely make or break anyone who relies on search. They have enough dominance in the market that if they were to choose to delete something from search results, it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market who cannot at all get by on the tiny fraction of traffic they get from other sources.
This is not the case for all areas of search, but it's the case for enough of them that the concerns about Google's monopoly are valid.