Google has a ton of competition across all of its products. It's dominating in some of them but being better then your competition is a lot different then there not being any.
This was also true for Microsoft. There were plenty of other operating systems, even PC ones.
I experienced this first hand at a company I worked for in the early '90s - we had agreements signed with many PC manufacturers to include our software (which was a DOS launcher of sort, that -- in those days of Win3.0 barely coming out, was more favored by users than Win3), and then all of a sudden, within 3 weeks, every single one of the manufacturers canceled -- and it later turned out Microsoft just visited each and every PC manufacturer and told them their MSDOS "discount" is going away if they bundle our launcher or anything similar.
In other markets, e.g. Office. in which, at the time, they were not a dominant player (Lotus123 was king, Borland Quattro was a strong player, Excel was less so; WordPerfect was king of pword processing), they actually competed by turning out better products.
[0] http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-live...
However, I think this is not comparable to what Microsoft did in the OS business (the story I told, BeOS, DR-DOS, IE Bundling) -- an apt comparison would be if the Google Search Engine had been Chrome only, or mobile Googling was Android only.
Google Earth is a niche product - I don't see how this (or any other less-than-fair Google practice I've ever heard of) can be considered abusing one's monopoly in any way.
EDIT: doesn't make your point about switching search engines less valid. It is orders of magnitude easier to change than an OS. But Google now spans other areas besides search.
If you start a startup even in cloud photo storage, and suddenly Google Photos comes along, you’re dead. No one will fund you anymore, and you’ve basically lost.
Google has such an immense amount of network effect, and of knowledge they can gain from dominating in other markets, that if Google enters a market – unless there’s regulations or network effects that prevent this – they immediately dominate it.
They have unilateral power to bury someone in search results though. Which can effectively require them to use adsense.
I don't think this is reasonable. Buy our other product or get poor search results. There's a few really good examples on other threads here. The best example I saw involved a hypothetical YouTube competitor facing a large number of DMCA takedowns, they may be complying with the law, but the takedowns will give google an excuse to bury them in search results forever more, while they can "excuse" YouTube.
That said, I know that splitting companies until they only do one thing isn’t possible.
But Google’s scale of domination is quite unique. Especially recently, as they’ve forced Android devs into using Google services more and more.
Many cases where battery optimizations "accidentally" kill the competition, which is fixed 3 releases later, but by then, there is no competition left anymore.
Size gives you advantage, but its not an auto win.
Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good, not because it's been forced on everybody by a monopoly. Their other apps that aren't good enough to take over a market don't take over a market.
Because they have the issue of existing competitors with network effect.
> Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good
And why is it so good? Because Google uses an advantage they gained from (partially illegally) datamining user data.
Google Duo is better than Skype, Google Allo is better than Telegram.
They don’t take over the market only because Skype and co have existing userbases – network effect.
Sure, if you want to pick the weakest competitor, they're better. Duo competes with facetime, not skype. Allo competes with WhatsApp, not Telegram.
Yes, part of what makes Google Photos good is the integration with their other products. "network effect" is a thing. But leveraging your other products is not the same thing as being an illegal monopoly. iCloud Photos has a network effect. Facebook's photo sharing product has a much larger network effect than Google's.
Yet Allo has less users than IRC, or Signal, or Telegram. And Duo has less than Skype.
The network effect is very powerful, and the network effect of social contacts is stronger than the network effect of software integration.
Google dominates email, but waves and even inbox I would say aren't catching on. They are failing in mobile messaging. Even though they own a huge part of your social graph through phone and email, they still can't get social right. Google owns ITA but Google flights is not the first place you look for plane tickets. Google also owns Zagat, but foursquare and yelp still dominate.
I think the argument only looks at the wins and completely ignores everything else.
Because there is a pre-existing market with network effects. The one thing that Google just doesn’t 'get' are network effects.
Regarding Yelp!: Google has spent a lot of effort (leading even to confrontation in court) trying to kill Yelp!’s business already.
Google has network effects as well as they own Android dialer, hangouts, google messenger, and email. I don't buy this argument. They just failed.
Also you'd be the first person I'd see that defends Yelp's business model, but yeah I'm not familiar with the Google vs Yelp court case.
Google copied Yelp!’s ratings, showed them without any backlink in Maps and Places.
Once Yelp! complained, Google told them to either suck it up, or to use robots.txt to opt-out of Google search entirely.
"If you want to be in the index, you have to allow us to scrape your data and present it however we want".
This is a big part of the current EU Antitrust case, btw.
I find it difficult to see Google as a monopoly when Apple has an even bigger market cap.
What will happen is that you will get a flood of DMCA takedown notices, and Google will get a flood of DMCA takedown notices for your site. Then Google will penalize you in search rankings for being a source of so many DMCA notices. Meanwhile, YouTube -- which generates far more takedown claims than you ever will -- is exempt from that ranking penalty because it's a Google service.
The same is true of a lot of other areas; Google can and does use ranking penalties and placement priorities on the search-result pages to give preferential treatment to its non-search businesses. How will you compete with that?
You will have an uphill battle against Google ranking penalties, while YouTube gets a free pass.
Google also automatically ignores any such claims for their own properties w.r.t search ranking.
And that’s exactly what they’ve done.