First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony.
Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation.
Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem.
Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong.
For example, Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning:
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
With Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 we get supreme court cases that states things like: The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
And in an other supreme court case:
The goal was to prevent restraints of free competition in business and commercial transactions which tended to restrict production, raise prices, or otherwise control the market to the detriment of purchasers or consumers of goods and services, all of which had come to be regarded as a special form of public injury. For that reason the phrase "restraint of trade," which, as will presently appear, had a well understood meaning in common law, was made the means of defining the activities prohibited.
Not a word about monopoly but a lot about behavior which in common speech people call monopoly but actually refer to behavior which is illegal according to anti-trust.
Whether you use anti-trust synonymously with the word monopoly doesn't change the fact that Google will still show Bing and Yandex in the search results.
An example of anti-competitive behavior here is actually from Amazon, when they had de-listed Apple TV and Chromecast from their marketplace for years because it competed with their Fire Stick.
Are you suggesting that we should ignore people misusing economic terms when discussing economic policy? I don't see how ignoring blatantly false facts is better than educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms.
But as site owner, you need traffic. SEO for some search engine built by your brother, used exclusively by your family, wont help you grow your business. You need eyeballs, and more than 90% of those are on google [0]. Pretending this is a perfectly functioning market and websites can just ignore google is... unrealistic.
If Google were to try and charge users for search, everyone would immediately switch to bing which keeps them in check from raising prices like they would if they were the only provider of search. They are in no way a monopoly.
If you substitute "harmfully disproportionate market power" for "monopoly", the points most people are making remain similar.
> educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms
Where did you do that? The only recommendation for a better term I see is "harmfully disproportionate market power", still quite a usable mouthful and made by someone else. Your contribution seems to boil down to "your wrong", and I'm still unsure if this is intended to be about the use of the word or the actual point. Probably both, with one being secretly used to support the other.
Google -> search results (for free) -> website (owner paid for seo/adwords and charge the customer)
Similar thing happened with google maps while they were never a monopoly by your definition because other solutions exist.
Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible.
Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
Although that also describes another beverage, coffee. The difference between the coffee and soft drink industries is interesting though. Two massive corporations dominate almost the entire soft drink industry, with a handful of minor providers (notably Keurig Dr Pepper) and a long tail of much smaller 'boutique', novelty, or regional brands. Comparatively, no coffee company controls as much of the industry as either the Coca Cola Company or PepsiCo do.
(Also, PepsiCo in particular owns a ton of other non-beverage brands. Their subsidiary Frito-Lay produces the brands Lay's, Cheetos, Doritos, etc. PepsiCo is huge for American consumers. To your point though, snack food isn't much better than sugar water.)
You can make the same argument for anything, from butter to guns to video games to literally anything that plugs into the wall and consumes electricity.
Use anything beyond reason and it becomes destructive.
Amazon also runs an entirely separate and special cloud staffed only by US citizens to assist the military in running software that decides who to detain, torture, and possibly murder, so it is unsurprising that they have no corresponding aversion to media depicting less violent interactions.
That literally happened.