What market though? There is no search market. It is a service given away for free. There is no such thing as a monopoly on something that does not cost anything.

Companies like Google and Facebook have pretty much cornered the market of the attention economy.

The vast majority of web users have their eyes and attention directly guided by one of these [0]. If they decide you do not exist, then you will effectively cease existing for billions of people on the web because they do not know a web outside of Google/YouTube or the Facebook ecosystem.

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

> There is no such thing as a monopoly on something that does not cost anything.

This is the wrong way to think about it. How much would _Google_ be willing to pay to maintain that position? Well, Mozilla's primary source of revenue, is afaik, from having Google as the default search engine, so at least that much, for whatever percent of the browser market-share.

You're kidding, right? the first damn near full page of google search is nothing but ads which they make a killing off of.

If search wasn't profitable then ads in search and SEO wouldn't exist.