Edit: Looks like many don't understand that you have alternatives to Google and you can use them.
Google has a search monopoly effective enough that they can solely make or break anyone who relies on search. They have enough dominance in the market that if they were to choose to delete something from search results, it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market who cannot at all get by on the tiny fraction of traffic they get from other sources.
This is not the case for all areas of search, but it's the case for enough of them that the concerns about Google's monopoly are valid.
Since "Google is not a monopoly" I am sure no one would have a problem with this behavior... :)
Google does NOT have a monopoly on searching for the sorts of products you buy on Amazon. In that particular exceptional case, a lot of people do go straight to Amazon for the search.
Google's monopoly is on other sorts of searching.
> it could utterly devastate all sorts of players in the market
That's the risk you take if you bank your entire business off of your search rank on Google. You should diversify accordingly.
This fuzziness you speak of has lead to massive overreach in the past, and it needs to stop.
Google's search dominance is under threat from competition, but they do enough anti-competitive stuff to keep their dominance that it's an issue.
Maybe a big step would be just to block Google from paying Apple and others to make Google the default. I don't know. Probably the more impactful would be to separate the Google search business from the Android stuff. The benefit Google has from tying those two together makes it really so much harder for competition to gain ground.
If you want a pretty neutral balanced view of the issues of anti-trust, Planet Money did a good little series on how overreach in the past led to excessive caution and underreaction now.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...
