When I build a house, do I have to pay $25k to get my Google pipes hooked up? Seriously where are the parallels?
We can talk all day about how DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail exist. But for a huge, huge majority of people, Google simply is the internet.
You need electricity to get television, you don't need television to get electricity. You need electricity to get the internet, you don't need the internet to get electricity. Now whether or not television or internet are more useful than electricity is an entirely separate question. But which of the three is the baseline utility is a bit obvious.
But again, the intended purpose is probably not to make Google a utility, it's to score political points. So none of these arguments are really relevant to the calculus that a politician would work through before taking an action like this. This is still a brilliant action from a political perspective because it will undoubtedly win incumbents some votes.
Gmail maybe. Providing email as a utility service is a strained argument but could be made as there is a parallel to actual mail service.
Literally everything else Google does has a mainstream alternative that is a click away.
Except no one clicks away (most people).
Which is why it will obviously fail at actually doing anything useful.
However, the intended purpose may not be so much to do anything useful, as it is to score some points for incumbent politicians. In that, it could succeed brilliantly. It's actually a very smart move if you consider the political benefits accrued to politicians.