Yeah, I think regulators realise we have a monopoly brewing once they see people buying Google branded milk from Googlemarts, having driven there in Googlemobiles, using traffic directions from... Google.

That's not a monopoly - a monopoly would be if for at minimum one of those things, you could only find a Google-controlled version.

I think it is monopolistic. If one company has so much influence in your life that they can direct you to their own products, so that you habitually start relying on them for almost anything, then they have the ability to develop a wide range of monopolies by influencing your choices. E.g. Google has a monopoly as a trusted source of all information - what's even stranger, is that they are seen as a non-interfering third party by most users - because of this, many other monopolies can emerge, because they have the ability to control "truth" and "popular opinion".

By that logic, Walmart would already be a monopoly in the perception of quite a few people in America, which is clearly not the case to much of the rest of the country.

That's not true, but it's close; at least according to US law. Microsoft was deemed a monopoly in 2000 (which is actually legal) and abused it's monopolistic powers (which is not legal) while other OS's existed in the market: Apple, BeOS, Novell, Linux, OS/2, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

As you know, Microsoft had more than 90% of the OS market worldwide. While other OSes did exist, they didn’t provide meaningful competition. The person to which you replied meant that Google Milk is only a problem if Google abuses its search monopoly to push the market away from other milk vendors, not that Google isn’t a monopoly as long as another search engine exists. Their main point was that it isn’t abusing a monopoly to launch a broad array of products if each of those products compete in a fair market.

For the legal notion of monopoly, you don't need to be the literal only one.

Definitely the political angle in most of these regulatory institutions is frustrating. And money in politics as an extension.

It’s further complicated by the fact that a lot of this stuff functions more like a public utility than a line of business. It may well be that nationalizing the firm makes more sense than cracking it up.