However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
(I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)
Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm.
It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.
Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again.
It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm?
Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
It kills competition since most of them are financed by an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without competition we get such nice things like randomized automated life time bans, non existent customer service, products that are randomly killed, overly anti competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just one of many many issues.