I share your concerns about monopolies and monopolistic practices, including Google's (which is my employer). In this specific instance, I don't see that Googl

I share your concerns about monopolies and monopolistic practices, including Google's (which is my employer). In this specific instance, I don't see that Google's dominance of search is a cause of the problem. Imagine that there were ten search engines all owning 10% of the market. The independent therapist was buying ads on all of them. Then COVID hits and she starts facing ad competition from national telehealth providers on all ten of those ad networks, driving up ad prices. She will have essentially the same experience, and the exact same article could be written. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Google's larger marketshare is a large piece of what's going on here. To me, it looks almost entirely like a small business all of a sudden facing much larger competition because of telehealth. Imagine if one day every restaurant got a free teleportation terminal at their front door. If you run a local barbecue restaurant in your small town, it's going to be a lot harder to stay competitive when everyone nearby can freely choose between you, Franklin in Austin, Joe's in Kansas City, or even just the comparatively larger marketing budget of Smokey Bones. Like it or not, these independent therapists got dumped into a much larger pond.