Fair enough. Note, I'm not arguing that there is no appropriate use of FTC action to stop anti-competitive behavior. The informally discussed actions attributed

Fair enough. Note, I'm not arguing that there is no appropriate use of FTC action to stop anti-competitive behavior. The informally discussed actions attributed to MSFT employees would probably qualify (certainly using browser monopoly to effectively block websites). However, it never happened and "informal conjectures" are pretty dubious. I don't think that rises to the standard of evidence that Google wouldn't exist had the FTC not intervened. From the same article What eventually humbled Bill Gates and ended Microsoft’s monopoly wasn’t antitrust prosecutions, observers say, but a more nimble start-up named Google, a search engine designed by two Stanford Ph.D. dropouts that outperformed Microsoft’s own forays into search (first MSN Search and now Bing). Then those two dropouts introduced a series of applications, like Google Docs and Google Sheets, that eventually began to compete with almost every aspect of Microsoft’s businesses. And Google did all that not by relying on government prosecutors but by being smarter. You don’t need antitrust in the digital marketplace, critics argue. “When our products don’t work or we make mistakes, it’s easy for users to go elsewhere because our competition is only a click away,” Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, said in 2012. Translation: The government ought to stop worrying, because no online giant will ever survive any longer than it deserves to. I am certainly familiar with alternative options to popular digital products. Some of them do in fact gain adoption, which seems to counter your position that it's impossible to gain traction because of monopoly power. They often get bought by the incumbent (Facebook's properties being the most obvious example). Note that some independents (Snapchat, Twitter) have also managed to rise post-Facebook and IPO. It's not clear monopoly power is what makes these supposedly subpar products dominant. Certainly I use Google Calendar because I use GMail, and I use GMail because I don't care enough to look for another email provider. It's good enough for me. If a better one came out, worth switching to, I certainly would. Just like I switched my email from Yahoo! to GMail when GMail came out. I think there's a difference between a company being big and holding the lion's share of the market (Tide holds 50% market share in laundry detergent) and being a monopoly. Telecoms and utilities are monopolies, in many markets. There are no other options. I don't see why Google Search is (DuckDuckGo exists and has done pretty well with a focus on privacy, for example; and of course Bing). But I also disagree that it's _not_ because Google has the best search results. As far as I can tell, they do. Who's better?