As a user, I am quite happy with this status quo. The quality of the service is pretty good, and there isn’t much user-facing rent seeking. Compare this to the app stores, which are a true public utility monopoly in Apple’s case, and you’ll immediately see the difference of true monopoly.
Your perspective is a bit skewed here towards the software world. There are businesses on every street-corner in the US, and for that matter world, without any meaningful internet presence or need for great search engine ranking. And for that matter, consumer products and consumer-facing businesses are only a subset of the $20T+ economy of the US.
OTOH maps add businesses even if the businesses don't add themselves.
I can't believe this is a serious comment. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars would say otherwise. I search for consumer products on Google all the time.
When I'm looking to buy something, I'll usually start my search on Amazon or Pinterest or Walmart or eBay or Etsy. Google is definitely a search of last resort.
Everyone's behavior is different, but while Google may "own" search for knowledge, it absolutely does not "own" search for consumer products.
For me and for people I know, even the general search is now more and more served by new search engine platforms like Alexa/Siri which are the only search engines on products like Echo and have a monopoly.
With vertical search platforms coming up, looking at just a general search engine is the old way. Search is no longer just the traditional old style search engines from 90s. Alexa/Siri haven't been monetised yet, but you can see the dominance of Amazon in product search space by their rapidly growing ad revenue.
Nobody give a flying flitwick what products you buy - there are only products to buy on the major exchanges (Amazon/Walmart/<InsertGroceryStore>).
No, this has directly to do with stealing ideas on a mass scale, and then not really being able to cope without handing your sht over - if your business is to sell e.g. lift truck systems to big box stores, and you spend time, energy, effort, going through all the systems to figure out what you need to do properly build systems which those big box stores want, there NOTHING STOPPING GOOGLE FROM STEALING ALL THOSE IDEAS VIA SEARCH RESULT AND PUTTING THAT BIZ OUT OF BIZ.
Now yes you can argue some of it might* be covered by Patent - thing is lawsuits cost time and money, big biz like Google? It can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and spend a lot of time wasting your money while you try to litigate it's IP theft. Meanwhile, because it dominates search results, your revenue streams drop to zero and you can't afford the fees to win...patent becomes irrelevant.
Or worse, because patent's need to be complete ideas/concepts, it auto-files the patent before you ever get done dusting off the cobwebs on your concept.
"Just hire a patent lawyer" - don't be ridiculous, that's exactly how you kill/stifle innovation. Nobody's innovating by first hiring a patent lawyer, that's what you do after the fact or if you just have buckets of money to throw around... (again, killing innovation by reducing 'innovators' to rich fuckers versus anyone who has a good idea and can implement it).
And you not only need to play the SEO game, you have to pray that Google just doesn't decide to get into your business and start returning their own results instead (which is exactly what this lawsuit is about). Especially since Google has had the chance to suck up all the data that you've provided in optimizing your site to provide the most relevant results.