It's definitely not a perfectly competitive market but this trope about GAFAM being monopolies is tiring. A monopoly can stagnate development on their product, raise prices and there's nothing customers can do because they have literally no other option. That is why monopolies are bad.

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.

The pedantry around the term "monopoly" is also a bit tiring.

If you substitute "harmfully disproportionate market power" for "monopoly", the points most people are making remain similar.

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.

For a proper exchange of ideas to function, the listening side has to try it's best to interpret the message as intended. Yes, to a degree does that include ignoring misuse of language. That obviously doesn't mean you can never give any feedback.

> 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.

Not if the "charge for search" is actually paid by the website. Google is indirectly charging the users

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.

His point is that Google isn't a monopoly from the user side. What if Google started offering the ability for websites to pay to increase their pagerank?