There is some kind of kind of logic in this, Google, is more than a Search monopoly, or Maps, or Gmail, or Google Play, or Google Ads, or presence on very large number of website through Ads, Analytics, ReCaptcha, and lord knows what. Google is not a monopoly, it is more than that.
How does Google have a monopoly on search? Does Bing or DuckDuckGo not exist? Or the dozens of other sizable search engines? Monopoly does not mean majority shareholder.
This. Exactly. Google enjoys a natural monopoly (or in my view, a non-monopoly) in search because they continue to earn the most business there, not because they have eliminated viable alternatives.
Don't be ridiculous, Google is a platform company. Any service they create contributes to the same platform. Hence, if search is a monopoly so is the rest of the services.
While I enjoyed the Bing search :) the existence of one or two other search engines with meaningful market share does not show that Google is not a monopoly.
Being a monopoly (at least in economics) does not mean being the only player in a market, but rather about being big enough to affect/set prices in the market.
Not only does Google not hold a true monopoly on search (they hold top mindshare, but there are several other easily available search engines one of which I use frequently), this particular brouhaha is about hosting, not search, on which they don't hold anything that could even be reasonably confused with a monopoly.
Google is a monopoly for what service? I don't use Google (directly) for search. I use Google for some email accounts and other providers for other email accounts. I use Firefox instead of Chrome. I use Android, mainly because it's far more open than ios, and it's possible to use a de-Googled Android (although the useful-ness is reduced). None of the above is related to news, however, which is what this particular discussion is centred around. I don't go anywhere near Google for news. I know Australia's media websites, and I use them directly, and attempt to focus on the more independent ones because they're less likely to be unduly influenced.
If you think Google is a monopoly, then how is Facebook not? Either in direct relation to this discussion of News or in relation to the greater internet?
No. Bing is a click away and provides comparable results. A monopoly occurs when the consumer has no choice but the monopolist. That's clearly not the case here.
Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search. That has been the case for over a decade now.
The competitors to Google, outside of a few markets like Russia and China, are trivial at best.
Google's search competitors are so weak, all they've collectively done is lose market share for 20 years. The social competitors to Facebook - Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. - are no more threatening to FB's monopoly than DuckDuckGo and Bing are to Google's search monopoly.
When companies like Google and Facebook have monopolies, what they do in response is lie: they claim competition is everywhere. Microsoft used that lying tactic as well. They pretend they're not really in the search space specifically, they're an ad company in general, and they're only a small N% of the whole global ad market. So Google likes to lie and pretend they compete with every input box on the Web, and every ad served anywhere on earth; naturally their share of all text input box usage is merely 1%.
That has nothing in particular to do with whether Google is a monopoly or not, though. Google doesn't graduate into being regulated by the FEC just because it's big.
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