Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.
It's time to break up Google.
It's more than that. Their behavior has changed.
Some years ago everyone was on their side because they were fighting for network neutrality and building Google Fiber and supporting Linux and providing Chilling Effects links to notify users of DMCA censorship and generally sticking it to the MPAA/Comcast/Microsoft.
These days they're not only not really doing that anymore, now they're misidentifying videos with YouTube Content ID and infecting web standards with EME and tracking everyone much more comprehensively than they used to.
People only think you're on their side as long as you continue to do things that show you're on their side.
They could stop companies from advertising "free" Youtube if they were for net neutrality. Same goes for Facebook and others, of course.
some examples from the 3 big operators in Portugal:
http://www.moche.pt/tarifarios/moche-legend/
That's driven by stuff like political stances, ad and content moderation practices, search result ordering, and other much less technical concerns.
People are always forgetting that tech people are the ones involved in decisions about tech stuff.
When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT department, not the transportation department.
When Uncle Bob isn't sure which phone to buy, he asks his nephew the programmer instead of his other nephew the geologist.
When a reporter writing a tech story is looking through their contacts for someone to call for background, they choose the professor of Computer Operating Systems over the professor of Russian History.
When the government is involved in tech litigation, the EFF is there, not the ASPCA.
When some tech issue is in Congress, Wikimedia and Mozilla can put it in front of millions of people, not some blogger with a hundred readers.
It is usually unwise to disregard the interests of the people with the strongest influence.
Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers. Same with all outsourcing deals.
I'm sure that has happened somewhere at least once. But in general what happens is that the executive reads a magazine article about The Cloud and the IT department gets orders to "do cloud" when the executive doesn't even know what that means. So the details fall to IT, like which provider to use.
And in the cases where the details are decided by people who don't understand the technology, they'll inevitably choose the wrong things and pay five times too much. Which makes it easy for IT to get a lower quote from the provider they actually want.
I mean your argument is essentially that executives are all incompetent and easily swayed by shiny objects and bright colors. But that was sort of the point -- they're as susceptible to being controlled by crafty subordinates as crafty vendors, if not more so.
Just like Apple, Facebook and Amazon?
"If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product" doesn't mean that if you are paying for the product, you're not the product.
This is the first time I've seen someone completely ignore, and even directly contradict, that incredibly common warning.
Don't forget salesforce, microsoft and oracle.
Facebook? Yes.
Amazon? Even more yes.
That's not monopoly power.
[0] as a consumer I care about the phone's features, not its profit margin for the manufacturer. There's still a healthy ecosystem of non-Apple companies making phones.
Btw, you can already put Windows on their hardware, or Linux for that matter.
I'm not sure that's the case; Apple isn't as dominant in share of any intuitively-described market as, say, Google and search ads, but a more relevant test for monopoly is pricing power, and I wouldn't be surprised if they in fact have that for some of their products/services.
It's a test that exists because there are an infinite number of ways to construct named categories of products, which can create any appearance you want, but none of them tell you if things in that category are genuinely competing with each other.
Also, being a monopoly isn't in and of itself illegal, it's abusing your monopoly position to harm competition. You have to be a monopoly first.
You don't need to have a monopoly to have pricing power, your product just needs to be differentiated enough.
Another competing factor is that Google makes most of its money in advertising - so every feature of every product has the opportunity to be compromised for the benefit of advertising. Internet advertising needs another revolution!