Monopoly law is based on whether or not consumers are harmed. Consumers want free and cheap and quality, Google gives that thanks to economy of scale. Break up Google and consumers will pay more for the same services. until another company steps up and does the same thing Google does. this could be Baidu or Yandex. Yandex has their own version of drive, maps, Gmail, search etc etc.
Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was completely ineffective to the customer.
Plus google's goal is to funnel everything into ads. Search sucks ass. It's all astroturfed or straight up fake content these days. Users are getting scammed clicking on these links. Small businesses are getting strangled out because they can't pay protection fees that the megacorps that aren't flooded out by AI generated and SEO-optimized slop can. We all suffer because of that.
Google has a stranglehold on email. Try sending a non-gmail message to a gmail account as a normie and you're probably going straight to the spam bucket. How much has it costed people who had their messages lost because they won't hand all their data over to Google?
Technically, competition "exists", but it's strangled out to the point of basically not existing. Other companies can offer all these services if they grow big. The problem is there's no other company that can compete with google in the US. And whenever a new company comes along that can shake up the game, Google/Apple/Microsoft buy them out and shut them down, unless they're part of the club already (e.g. OpenAI)
You end up in spam with Gmail if you haven’t got your email hygiene in order. I’ve sent messages from cold Hetzner IPs and a cold domain name and managed to deliver to Gmail inboxes by having SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly configured. It really is that simple. Same goes for Microsoft. Follow the standards, avoid spammy looking words, avoid sending empty messages and you’ll be fine.
Emails that I want from non-gmail senders end up in spam. Sometimes fake Amazon emails from random gmails end up in my main inbox. Google passing responsibility for their own bad algorithms onto users is a consequence of their monopoly status.
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