Stifle competiton? Are you serious? All what Google does is destroying other peoples's businesses for fun - see, we have shitload of money and nothing to do, why we just offer that what you offer, but for free - haha looser.
This is not some absurd thing to say. The only question is whether that happened. (I sort of believe it did, at least on some level.)
That doesn’t make Google super-evil in my eyes, but it’s a mark against them.
That said, I think there's some sense in calling anti-competitive when a player lowers the price temporarily, in order to drive out competitors and jack up the prices afterwards. But that's clearly not what happened here.
It’s anti-competitive if Google Reader on its own wasn’t profitable and Google nevertheless kept it alive (funding it with money from elsewhere in the company), thus killing competitors.
Maybe it is, but then I say, hurray for the anti-competitives!
This isn’t a black and white problem.