consumers are in this case the advertisers.

google has a monopoly on search ads and does enforce it, being a drain on the economy since in many fields you only succeed if you spend on search ads

> consumers are in this case the advertisers.

If someone could convince the courts that this is correct, then I'm sure Google would lose. However, I bet dollars to donuts Google's counter-arguement would be that the people doing the searching and quickly finding information are also consumers, and they outnumber advertisers and may be harmed by any proposed remediation in favor of advertisers.

googles answer to this at yesterdays hearing..

Search isnt a single category. If you break it down, they arent a monopoly. For example. 1/2 of PRODUCT SEARCHES begin on Amazon. It's probably hard to argue Google as a monopoly if who they see as their main competitor has half the market share.

The US is so behind in identifying markets in technology which is what is leading to this dominance by a few companies and their resulting monopoly like power. We had already figured out that you can be dominant in only a subset of a market. For example Disney was forced to sell off fox sports channels when it purchased fox because it already owned espn and would have dominated sports TV. That’s the thing it wasn’t even just TV but a subset, sports TV. That identification is where we are behind. As of now no, one in the FTC knows what makes a market or why say YouTube and Facebook may both show large amounts of video content but are absolutely not competitors in video content space. It is because the functions are completely different. YouTube is barely a social network at all despite having users and comments and pages. Facebook is hardly a video platform at all because it isn’t profitable for users to focus on Facebook videos and make ad money.

Anecdotally, its true for books too. Amazon is a great way to figure out which books are the best reviewed before deciding to get one (whether paper, kindle or 'other means').

That's so disingenuous there should be a new term for it.

gSplain or gWash

Which is shortsighted. If competition did not benefit consumers, there would be no need for it anyway.

Anti-trust above all recognizes competition benefits consumers. And so “unfairly competing” is prohibited, because it is bad for the market, thus bad for consumers.