Safari rendering engine has 100% market share of ios browsers.
But Google search is more like a public utility than a service. It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts competitors but in the end also consumers which will end up with only one option for maps, video sharing, etc. And hypothetically speaking, at this point Google could just shove whatever they want down their throats and tell them to deal with it.
Oh wait they already did that with Google+
Assuming they did prime place their own products, this is not a recognized antitrust harm (it is not bundling or tying, despite random claims on HN).
Harmful indeed.
90% market share + hiding competitor sites to eg Google Places is punishable by EXISTING EU law.
Do you think it's ethical or good for society simply because it hasn't yet been ruled illegal?
My opinion on things related to competition/antitrust are based mainly on evolution of law and economic viewpoints.
Basically, over the past hundred years, courts have moved away from (and economists have strongly supported) declaring these kinds of things as "per-se" illegal precisely because evidence has not shown that you can simply point at them and say "yeah, this hurts competition" or "yeah, this hurts consumers", despite what one may think.
In some cases, this evolution of law/economy has pretty clearly turned out bad for consumers price-wise (with the return of folks requiring retailers to sell at certain minimum prices).
In some cases it hasn't.
This particular thing, hard to say.
The second part of your comment only mentioned prices as a factor in terms of what is good or bad for 'consumers'. I realize that you leave room for other ideas of what is good or bad, but in lieu of mentioning anything else, it seems as though this is all you are willing to put forward as a criterion.
I guess I understand a little more about your perspective, but not much.
Truthfully, this kind of stuff is only tangentially interesting to me: Companies without physical resource monopolies (ie oil, diamonds, whatever) tend to come and go despite all efforts to the contrary. I don't expect Google, Facebook, or anyone else will be any different.
Or the new GMail app on the Lollipop ROM for my Nexus 5.
My email address was originally on Google Apps. I switched to Windows Phone from my Palm Pre in 2011 and they discontinued Exchange ActiveSync support shortly thereafter, so I moved everything over to Windows Live Domains, keeping my Google Apps login as my Google account.
I recently took a foray to Android in June and picked up the Nexus 5 I'm currently using, and I had no issues setting up my now Outlook.com account (same email address I used for my Google account) in the stock AOSP email app, I removed GMail and there was no trace of my no longer used Google Apps services on my device. Now with Lollipop, I always see two email accounts, one of which is the Google Apps account that no longer has email routed to it but I have no way to hide, and since it shares the same address getting my Outlook.com account added was a pain in the ass (it errored saying I cannot add multiple accounts with the same email address, had to use my @outlook.com alias).
Google used its search monopoly to wedge its way into other areas, the two big ones being email (I see way more active @gmail.com users than I do @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com/@outlook.com and ISP emails today) and online video (youtube). They then used these markets to push their way into the mobile space, which now has the opposite effect (their mobile OS is pushing people into using Google services exclusively).
Both iOS and Windows Phone use their own account systems (Apple ID and Microsoft Account respectively) to provide access to platform-specific services (Store, Synchronization, etc) but both allow users to sign up without requiring they create an email account with them, and both platforms have easy setup for the wealth of other email/calendar/contact sync services most people use.
Honestly, anyone who DOESN'T see Google abusing their monopoly position to prevent or at least actively discourage people from using competitive services is lying to themselves.
Similarly, massive chunks of the internet rely on Google (and Facebook) for functionality like authentication. Aside from that, I'd struggle to suggest a different mail provider than gmail such is there monopoly in that space.
Outlook.com is great, I love it more than GMail personally, especially since I can pay a relatively affordable $19/year to get rid of the ads and know that my email provider doesn't have programs scanning every word of every email I send or receive.
Privacy is a feature, you don't get that when using Google services.