Here are more:

- (jumping off of your second point...) Play Services does more than just handle stuff you sign into as a user -- it's also a dependency for everything from push notifications to screen casting. This actively poses issues building competing platforms, in that in order to give developers a path to shipping in your ecosystem you have to provide functioning alternatives to all of those ancillary features. The compatibility issue also impacts user adoption, and then the user adoption and the barren marketplace impact each other... Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this. (Facebook did, but I'm also not sure forking the OS into a separate VR platform is necessarily the same thing.)

- It also comes with integrity checking, so even if you do find a good third party image, and sideload Google packages, numerous things won't work unless you take part in a dumb arms race that ironically requires you to also root your device. By which I mean a feature that was originally built for banking applications is now used everywhere from streaming services (as an additional layer of DRM) to gacha games (for anti-cheat). This is actually the entire reason I dropped Pokemon Go, personally.

Obligatory link to the excellent Ars piece on this topic: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

- the browser is undeniably critical as everyone's window through which they view the online world;

- the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc

- browsers aren't really a self funding product

- having a single for-profit US advertising company control everyone's view of the online world, however slightly (e.g. by obstructing adblockers), is Not Good

Splitting it off solves the latter problem but immediately raises the question of how to pay for it. A very artificial arrangement where Google pay "arms length browserco" to maintain Chrome?

Just look at Microsoft and their internet strategy, they chose the other route; push their internet browser(IE) down their massive distribution pipe called Windows and then introducing their search engine to this massive userbase. Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google. And now Google essentially controls the Web in the more than half of the world.

Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?

What browser would Android ship? In one view I kind of like the idea that Google would have to shop around and 'buy' a browser for its OS (competition good!), but also that seems ridiculous and easy to fall right back into the same trap.

I sign in browser-wide and I do takeouts regularly. I don't see my browsing data.

> It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.

And back when they were part of AOSP I never saw these example apps in the wild. Every vendor ships their own phone app. Every single one.

There's some "hey we compile a extremely old and vulnerable version of AOSP"-style Android distributions, mainly advertised for builtin su/Magisk or "degoogle", which did use these example apps, though.

I agree with other critics, they are toxic.

I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.

Go do something in chrome (look for cruises maybe), then delete the activity from myactivity.google.com, then wipe and reinstall chrome. You will see that you aren’t advertised based on that activity yet it’s still in your chrome history.

This particular example is a bit misleading as those apps are still available; they're just unbundled from the system image: https://source.android.com/docs/automotive/unbundled_apps/re...

I don't think Google owning Chrome is really a factor here, but just a raw traffic question where FF Mobile has basically zero uptake. The experience they serve on FF Mobile is just the "we arent subscribed to validating that all of our shiniest JS works with this version of this browser".

The extension spoofs the user agent and arbitrary obscure features that only trigger on specific queries may be broken.

Google does do the effort of validating on other browsers where the traffic threshold is higher, including Firefox on Desktop. If they didn't own Chrome nor Firefox they still wouldn't really have incentive to spend more time supporting the tiny fraction of users.

That's OK: these days, the phone (voice calling) app is only useful for receiving calls from scammers and telemarketers. I wouldn't miss it.

Huh, I wonder if this is why I have perceived a drop in quality from Google Search. What a stupid move from them -- not only have I stopped using Google Search and now pay Kagi (yes I know money still flows from Kagi to Google but even still) and have been evangelizing Kagi as well as taking every opportunity to shit on Google Search.

Great job G, you made the product worse and made me a customer of someone else

Can't say I've noticed that, but YouTube definitively feels like it's getting an especially slow-loading version on Firefox.

And that's one aspect of one product. Company-wide list would be probably impressive in the worst way possible

The most recent example being Gemini now deeply integrated into Chrome. Had Gemini been a stand-alone product, it would have to fight for every user. Now billions of users have it at their fingertips.

What's the difference, and where can I find this extension?

- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more hardware and software lockin to their platform: see unexportable passkeys

This is the point. Google's products integrate with Chrome better than non-Google products. Including its ad platform.

And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out. It is unfair competition. And you say there are many other well working options out there but that is simply not true. Googles web applications work best on Chrome and often break on non Chrome browsers. Mostly because of changes to those web applications and not because of random browser bugs. This is how you win people over and complete your browser world domination.

This is good reasoning. It is overreach for a regulatory body to do something that could impact the business model of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.

I only use Chrome to interact with Google properties. I'd love to use Firefox for everything.

For how long, though?

The trajectory for Firefox doesn’t look good at all (and it’s completely dependent on Google too).

Apple are doing their share of anticompetitive shenanigans with Safari on iOS, although the other way around.

Everything else is based on Chromium and therefore not contributing to any heterogeneity of implementations.

In this case, the "customers" are other companies.

Antitrust markets can be defined broadly or narrowly. In this case, the market was "general web search advertising" (among others).

Who are the consumers in this market? People and companies that want their ads placed where (and to who) it matters.

Isn't that kind of the complaint though? Google, by controlling the platform and therefore sort of indirectly controlling the entire web, can make it artificially easier to push you to their products, and push you away from others.

If I wanted, for example, to make a competitor to Google Docs, I'm not just competing with Google Docs, I'm also competing with the integration of Google Docs with Chrome, meaning that Google Docs can be artificially better than my product. While I don't know if Google has actually done this, it would be pretty easy for them to actively gimp any Google Doc competitor in Chrome so that you're more likely to use their service instead.

Then end goal is fostering competitions in a market where there is basically none. So yes, it obviously benefits would be competitors. That's the point.

It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers, and a browser which doesn't actively encourage you to use Google products and services.

Indirectly, a reduction in Google's centralized power will make life easier for many people and organizations which offer you services and products (yes, I realize that's a bit vague and needs some elaboration).

Google, in comparison, absolutely dominates the search and ad markets and sucks all oxygen out of them to keep any competition from springing up by controlling distribution and limiting choice. They e.g. paid vast amounts of money to Apple to make sure users don't get a free choice of search engine.

If you wanted to compare the Apple Watch with this it would mean that Apple would make exclusive deals with all stores (online and IRL) selling watches so that consumers would only see Apple watches everywhere they go and would need to look in the basement or on an obscure subpage to find any watches from a different manufacturer. Clearly that's not the case.

That said I'm not a fan of Apples walled garden either, I think this should be addressed (and in the EU it is being addressed). It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.

These things take a long time, though. I think the Apple one is just not as far along.

I opened my local configurator to buy a 13" M3 MacBook Air.

   Memory, update from 16GB to 24GB -> +230€

   SSD, update from 256GB to 2TB -> +920€

This makes web tracking and attribution impossible to anyone who is not Apple. Users might be happy with it but I think it is similar anti-competitive behaviour to what Google are doing.

I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.

This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.

Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.

For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.

As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.

Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.

Seems so, so much worse.

ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.

If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.

The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.

There’s probably a number of talented people out there who would love to drive that truck.

Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.

There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.

Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.

How is that even a question. It's worth billions. User data, ability to inject ads, ability to drive the future of web and web-based apps.

how it could exist without getting money for setting the default search engine is certainly a question though

Somehow I think that if they will decide to stay in their niche, Cloudflare might be a good fit for Chrome

Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.

Could happen under Trump...

The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.

Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.

TLDR just be like Mozilla

But to answer your question.

1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.

2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide.

3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.

The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.

I never got over that one either: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delaye...

> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us

Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.

Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill)

Also worth to mention Meta: Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything

Monopolies are bad, and it's not because some players were not punished that others shouldn't be (they all should).

Maybe this sets a precedent, and they are all targeted.

If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?

There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.

Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill.

> Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone.

They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.

Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.

Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.

“A computer on every desk and in every home”

Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight

Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)

Doing Apple's work for free.

The other 3 all have antitrust lawsuits currently going. Google’s is just the furthest along.

Windows, Office (Excel), .NET / C#, Vs Code, Visual Studio, free GitHub and more?

One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.

That's obviously not how it works

Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away):

1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing)

2. TypeScript

3. C# and the CLR

4. Visual Studio Code

5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source.

Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming.

Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.

And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way.

* Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it. * Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it. * Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing. * Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice.

We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity.

By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity."

[0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_16921... [1] https://multimediaman.blog/tag/apple-laserwriter/ [2] https://www.futureplatforms.com/blog/death-of-the-ipod-and-w... [3] https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/seven-ways-itunes... [4] https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-...

In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can.

Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones.

With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup.

But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!

I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.

It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.

Because this is not the case about display advertising, but the one about search engines and search advertising.

But also, if you think the display ads business is the jugular, I don't think you really understand their business. Have a look at the financials. The entire display ads business is <10% of their business, and shrinking in both absolute and relative terms.

Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.

They driven these numbers up to ensure that no one except them and their leashed pets could repeat it.

And here we are, you can have ten internet-enabled apps with texts, images and videos, basically the same functionality, but you can only copy nine of them.

You can’t even keep up with a simple fork.

Sure, we can have the original web with text and the occasional embedded photo. But if you want what amounts to a full blown operating system, with a rock solid sandbox, plus an extremely performant virtual machine, that’s going to be a high bar.

Of course it can and it is done: Linux Foundation Europe runs Servo, GNOME Foundation runs WebKitGTK and Epiphany, Ladybird Browser Initiative runs Ladybird.

This is not an issue though is it?

Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?

If it's a singular tech giant then that's a problem but if chrome had contracts with like a dozen+ companies then it sounds really sustainable.

If Chrome were to be separated from the Ad business, it would be beneficial for privacy.

It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum

If the decision drags on into the new administration, then the answer is probably Elon Musk.

The monetization is up to the spinoff or acquirer to figure out.

https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/how_antitrust...

The toys we enjoy today are not worth sacrificing future developments. Nothing advances customer interests as much as competition.

+ No platform ever must include an Internet Brower by default. User must install one some way without anyone being suggested or hinted by platform. Platform can inform user an internet browser can be installed but not saying how. Platform owner can set a default anytime

+ No Internet Browser ever must default, or suggest or hint a search engine. The platform owner can always pick one himself.

Internet Browser is defined as any program with a User Interface which can acquire content from any public network

The devil is inthe defaults.

Edit: I forgot to add how to finance it: Internet browser will now datamine the customer. Customer can pay for a privacy respecting browser, but we all know how that doesn't fly (yet)

And then it might not be for free. It's very tempting to rent-seek when you have a captive user base. That's bad for consumers and bad for the economy.

Focusing on what we get today is myopic and it's not by mistake that Google give them to us.

Kagi’s argument is simple: Google should give public access to their Search Index so that any company can take advantage of the core machine directly, under some terms of agreement. Like an API.

For the same reason proprietary cables aren't generally a monopoly problem: Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly. Google has [1].

[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-search-antitrust-case-5911...

But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)

> The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden.

Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?

If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.

I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.

I'm open to hearing different opinions.

How would the Chrome Company deal with this?

Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?

How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.

How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?

Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.

Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.

It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).

Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.

If people aren't choosing to use Firefox, Brave, Edge, etc. even though many of the competitors get the benefit of free Google engg labor on Chromium and are not connected to the so-called ad machine, maybe they don't want like the alternatives.

If this comes true, I take full responsibility for causing it.

"We will lose the last open platform" - umm, have you heard about Mozilla Firefox? It works really well.

Exactly, who on Earth could build a competitor? You're describing the problem!

The ability to take stunning losses each year without worry, knowing that it pays dividends in the value to search, ensures competition can't flourish. So it is anti-competitive.

This seems like a 'lets pretend to hurt google' thing.

No one complained about Chrome.

Company forced to sell cannot simply set an absurd price to evade regulators, as that would be plainly acting in bad faith

What do you want out of an alternative though - Better search or free? Because you can't have both. Ad-based search being free is exactly the reason it is bad. You get what you pay for?

If he's smarter than I think, then expect him to go after Google Search (the alleged source of anti-conservative bias). But if he's as dumb as I think, expect him to support the Chrome breakup, even though it would not advance his goals and wouldn't be coherent antitrust policy, because it would let him claim a "win".

Only monopoles like google can afford to burn so much cash. And that's a clear loss for the economy.

That doesn't mean this makes any sense.

How are they going to separate Chrome from Chromium? If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium? Can Google make another new fork of Chromium and start yet another browser? Or are they now banned from making browsers? What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business? What about ChromeOS? How are they going to handle the extensions store and ecosystem? How is this going to impact web standards?

There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.

Bad for consumers, how? Financially? How does that translate to the current situation? The average "consumer" here is paying $0.00 for Google, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Flights, Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, Books, Scholar, Shopping, YouTube, News, Groups, Voice... how are you going to argue that this "monopoly" (?) is bad for consumers? Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?

I can think of so many other arguments you could use to suggest the current situation is bad, but monopolies are bad for consumers seems like a really tough argument to apply here.

Edit: You need to argue more than "the current situation is bad". Because that in itself does not imply "removing the 'monopoly' would necessarily lead to the better outcome in my imagination." Exhibit A is all the behemoths trying to compete against Google and still offering objectively worse products.

On other hand splitting "free" product is somewhat questionable. When the competitor don't have exactly viable business model. Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.