I agree. This is a tech monopoly using its position of near-absolute power to try and oust a lesser competitor by co-opting their business model. Naïve "invisible hand" types will just see this as healthy competition, not realizing how hard Google can leverage other parts of their company to make this succeed and potentially destroy all competition. Anti-competitive behavior like this doesn't always result in destroying competition, e.g. Instagram Stories being a complete rip-off of Snapchat's entire app after Zuckerberg tried and failed to acquire Snapchat. It did hurt Snap Inc. [2], but they're still around.

Luckily Google has a huge history of adopting and then abandoning their projects[1]. So, maybe we'll get lucky and this will flop as hard as Twitter's Fleets.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/how-mark-zuckerberg-has-used...