In tech markets if your product/service is good, it very easily becomes a monopoly, because adoption is easy and there is no reason for users to stick with an inferior product.
Of course monopolies are still harmful. But that is beyond the point I am making. US tech companies aren't monopolies because of lack of regulation, but rather because they just have better products.
No doubt in the quality and time to market, however every single of these monopolistic companies have done monopolistic actions like bundling products, abusing their platforms, etc. After the initial success, their behavior matters.
It's not always easy to tell artificial bundling from genuine synergies. E.g. due to yet another EU regulation we don't have a proper integration between Google search and Google maps any more, and it definitely feels like a worse product from user's perspective
100% agree. I would be the first doing the same. Being a regulated entity is stupid hard.
I would contend that is not the only reason. Plenty of times the bigger companies are just buying up their competitors. The most famous example being Instagram. Instagram could have been it's own big company, but now it's part of a monopoly. And that's just a big example which happened semi amicably. There are plenty of documented cases of VC funded companies throwing their weight around.