It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.
Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.
[0] unless there is an existing contract
I absolutely disagree. In Google's case, their service have become an integral part to using the internet - and the internet has become an integral part of daily life. So such a block would absolutely have consequences.
> Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.
Then it would as well be breach of contract to lock me out of the Play Store until I agreed to an updated ToS. Apparently this can still be done if the old ToS contains the right clauses. So I suspect the phone ban would work similarly.
If you run a website that earns revenue based on incoming users and Google cuts you off, how is that not damaging you? You could use every single competitor and still not even get a quarter as much traffic as Google.
What if Google closed shop? Would you force them to reopen again? What if Google never existed?
The most severe thing they did was give retailers a hard choice: Either they only sell phones with Google's Android distribution (AOSP+Google Play) or they only sell phones with no-name AOSP distributions. They cannot sell both.
As missing out on the revenue from Google Play-based phones would be financially irresponsible, this choice had only one viable option: Not selling any other AOSP-based OS except Google's.
Therefore Google effectively made competing AOSP-based projects extremely hard to sell, regardless of their quality.
Having a single company own one industry after another is completely antithetical to the idea of capitalism, and if we're not going to do capitalism then we might as well start taxing Google even more to pay for public services, which I am sure they also don't want
This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.
The monopoly takes control and keeps prices higher than they would be with competition. New competition comes along every now and then but a monopoly just has to compete heavily for a short time to put the new comes out of business and then it's back to mining the market. This is how monopolies work and what anti trust legislature is supposed to stop.
Based on your comments here, I have to ask. Is there any situation you can think of where the government should step in to break up a company, short of violence or breaking a contract?
I'm gonna stretch my metaphor a lot.
Imagine street signs use polarized glasses (or something, I'm not an optics). I can see only those signs whose glasses I where.
I choose to wear google glasses. Everyone does, the competition is pretty good but google has been around for so long that I just don't really bother with anything else.
Now google takes down some signs. Am I really going to carry 3 pairs of glasses (N pairs, M are relevant) in order to figure out what street I'm on? or am I just going to walk a block to the next street and use the service google hasn't arbitrarily decided to destroy.