Sure, Google has the search monopoly, but they don't actively squash (or try to get laws made against) any other company trying to build an alternative search engine. I use DDG for most things, but occasionally have to repeat the search on Google because its just better.

Also, my point isn't that FAANG are perfect citizens and don't need any regulation at all, its that the Telecom companies are far worse If we're gearing up enough citizenry outrage to do some monopoly busting, lets start with them instead.

In the past decade I've lived in three different cities, and in each one Comcast was the only provider available. Do we really not think Comcast has a monopoly?

If you take the view that cellular or DSL aren't legitimate competition (despite having double-digit marketshare even where Comcast has no other competition), then Bing and Yahoo! aren't competition for Google either. In which case Google has a nationwide monopoly in search.

Actually, many economists - and perhaps most of them - argue that what's fundamental to monopolization concerns is the presence of undue barriers to entry that make the market non-contestable. "Market share" and "choice" are not helpful on their own, because a big market share could be entirely due to the incumbent pursuing efficiency and the consumer's best interests, so as to keep themselves ahead of any possible competitors. But this is a benign dynamic that will be quickly corrected should the incumbent fall behind, as competitors would quickly enter the market.

I'm not in SV, but this is 100% not true in my area. Where I live, my choice for broadband providers consists of Comcast. There is no alternative, nor is there any sign that competition is coming.

Only that you don't need an agreement to make it happen. Tacit understanding works just as well.

And phone service is not a viable alternative. Even 50gb (the standard cap it seems nowadays before throttling) gets you only 10-20 hours of video at high quality.

As to cellular—it’s a viable alternative for lots of people. Many people don’t need more than 10-20 hours of high quality video per month. 20% of people are already smartphone-only users, and that figure is growing. At the same time, those data caps are growing. Verizon’s 5G service has no data cap. Even if there is a soft cap of a few hundred GB, that’ll be a viable wired replacement for most people.

The trend in tech, by contrast, is the opposite. We’re not on the precipice of increased competition in search or mobile OSs. Indeed, with Microsoft throwing in the towel on Windows Mobile, there is less competition in that space than ever.

I don’t see how splitting up Apple or Google would increase the number of mobile OSs. There have been companies in the past that have tried building a mobile OS either for a specific phone or as an open source OS and none of them have really gained traction. There have been rumors for a couple years now of some of the phone manufacturers talking about building their own OS to use in place of android, yet those still haven’t appeared. Microsoft failed at mobile because they were too late to the party, people already knew which mobile experience they preferred.

That's not true, and I'm not sure where people get that idea. Slightly over half the country has two or more wired choices at 25 mbps, and that's as of a few years ago.

And if you're saying that texting my aunt in Bangladesh is a viable alternative to sharing pictures of my kids on Facebook, then it makes no sense to discount satellite, DSL, and cellular as viable alternatives to Comcast. (And indeed they are for many people--just over half the households in Comcast's footprint actually subscribe to its service.)