Aren't there anti trust laws to prevent this kind of thing?
Monopolies themselves aren't illegal. To be convicted of an antitrust violation, a firm needs to both have a monopoly and needs to be using anticompetitive means to maintain that monopoly. The recent "textbook" example was of Microsoft, which in the 90s used its dominant position to charge computer manufacturers for a Windows license for each computer sold, regardless of whether it had Windows installed or was a "bare" PC.
Depending on how you define the market, Google may not even have a monopoly. It's probably dominant enough in web search to count, but if you look at its advertising network it competes with Facebook and other ad networks. In the realm of travel planning (to pick an example from these comments), it's barely a blip.
Furthermore, Google can potentially argue it's not being anticompetitive: all businesses use their existing data to optimize new products, so Google could claim that it not doing so would be an artificial straightjacket.
> In the realm of travel planning (to pick an example from these comments), it's barely a blip.
They used their monopoly in web search to gain non-negligible marketshare in entirely unrelated industry. That's text book anti-competitive behavior.
Google can argue whatever they want, but the argument that they're enabling other businesses is a bad one. It casts Google as a private regulator of the economy, which is exactly what antitrust laws are intended to deal with.
BTW, newspapers also make money from subscriptions and sales of copies, so your analogy is doubly wrong.
Enough people realizing Google is trapping and cannibalizing traffic to the other sites it feeds off of, and choosing to do other things EXCEPT touching Google properties, is THE ONLY way they'll be unseated.
No clear legal path to stop a bully means it's an ethical / habit path.
Not saying there's any easy way, just that this is it.
In fact Google had to make certain concessions in order for the Google Flights acquisition to get regulatory approval.
IIRC a Chinese firewall between Google data and Google Flights...but like many regulations they were likely written by Google lobbyists aka the industry experts. Because at the end of the day Google flights: 1. Still has the built in widget above organic results and 2. They still bid on their own ad spots jacking up costs on competition which is ultimately passed on to consumers.
It's a tall order to convince the courts that Google's actions consumers, or is illegal: after all, being innovative in ways that may end up hurting the competition is a key feature of a capitalist society - proving that a line has been crossed is really hard, by design.
google has a monopoly on search ads and does enforce it, being a drain on the economy since in many fields you only succeed if you spend on search ads
If someone could convince the courts that this is correct, then I'm sure Google would lose. However, I bet dollars to donuts Google's counter-arguement would be that the people doing the searching and quickly finding information are also consumers, and they outnumber advertisers and may be harmed by any proposed remediation in favor of advertisers.
Search isnt a single category. If you break it down, they arent a monopoly. For example. 1/2 of PRODUCT SEARCHES begin on Amazon. It's probably hard to argue Google as a monopoly if who they see as their main competitor has half the market share.