"Your honor, I made a bunch of cool stuff, anti-trust should apply to me last!"
That's obviously not how it works
That's obviously not how it works
For example, Google doesn't have to change Chrome in any meaningful way to maintain (or even grow) it's market share. So, they don't. Browsers haven't changed much in a good decade and a half. That money is much better spent on marketing.
Competition drives prices down to the lowest sustainable point but not to zero. If one company drives prices below a sustainable (profitable) point that’s market failure because it starves the competition. It’s the thing Google did and the reason we have anti-trust law.
Google created a situation where they had no competition. Necessity being the mother of invention suggests that they innovate less in the absence of competition. Monopolies are poison to innovation.
We're not in a perfect competition environment ; profits are not to 0. There is an incentive for innovation.
Monopolies stifle innovation just the same. Imagine having an "amazon basics" product as your competitor. Or competing with something that embeds well in a closed off ecosystem like Apple's or Google's when 90% of your target demographic will value that integration.
Innovation breeds from a middle ground
The goldilocks is closer to 0 than not