Say I make a search engine better than Google. If I market it, I get some share of Google's users. The better my search engine is, the more of user base I “steal”.
What's wrong with that? Is there something Google can (legally) do to stop me?
What are you going to do other than close your business when you've been effectively blocked from the internet?
OpenAI isn't one person starting a search engine in their garage. But they acquired the reputation and resources to protect them from the behavior you describe through conventional means. And others can do the same.
Google will find some plausible excuse, something deep in ToS they broke, competitor will not be able to work around it or reach someone within Google to explain to them what exactly need to do to restore that part of service.
We'll all suspect Google has done so intentionally and maliciously, but nobody will be able to prove that beyond doubt.
Be that buying the competition, dumping to kill the competitors business, slapping them with lawsuits or making their competition illegal through lobbying.
And without antitrust, what would those conventional means be? norhing
How do you buy a non-profit?
Now, once you have discovered that this very normal and routine process literally does not exist, you might spend a little time researching how in the world this could be the case: even if you’ve spent thousands on that Google Workspace account, your only options are A) community support forums full of unpaid users helping users (Aw, isn’t that altruistic of those kindly users?) or, B) go away and deal with your problems yourself.
Anti-competitive practices and wielding a de facto monopoly position are perhaps not the singular or direct cause of this frankly astonishing lack of respect for their users, but it is absolutely tightly correlated with such open distaste for the people purchasing and using their products.
Lastly, not for nothing, but Google’s own origin story and wildly successful history are literally the result of anti-trust actions taken against their establishment competitors in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s.
Anyhow, there's a lot of Google Workspace competitors, switching to one of them shouldn't be a problem (at least for internal communications; sharing a self-hosted OnlyOffice link with somebody expecting a Google Docs document would be mildly weird).
Very bold assumption on your part.
Google's not #1 because it's orders of magnitude better than anything else anyone could come up with. It's #1 because Chrome's #1, while #2 (Safari) and #4 (Firefox) receive millions each year to keep it as default.
Your alternative, even if objectively better (whatever that means for a search engine) will never take a significant chunk of Google's market share because you can't outpay Google to get it into people's pockets by default. That's what anti-trust is about.
That was the assumption in the OP article – at least, that it was better than competitors at first. Of course, being the default plays a significant role in it keeping its popularity nowadays, but I still believe it can be worked around (and will be, but it'll take time).
TikTok is the only example I can think of of something succeeding in the past decade that's not from a company that also offers like a million other products. That's the power of having a monopoly.
If it gets regulated a bit (example: you get a prompt to choose your default search engine when you first open a browser), Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon might lose a dominant position in a category or two, but they have a dominant position in so many other categories that it'll mean nothing to them.
The only possible solution is regulating them hard, forcing each of those to dissolve into a dozen smaller companies and preventing them from buying up the competition even further. Then and only then will startups have a shot at snatching up a significant number of categories to really endanger what we now know as the Big Four.
What I am trying to say is in practice big corporations have many ways to get rid of their competion. For them there is no need to be better.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj...
Only if you have investors that can force you to sell. I know that “just bootstrap your own search engine lol” is not an answer, but I do think there's some middle ground.