There are so many angles. So many angles. Before chrome there where a lot more competing browser engines, so that is already a solid YES. Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market.

> at a fraction of the cost

Microsoft gave IE away for free and there where dozens of IE clones build on top of its engine, you just never had a reason to use any of them because in the end they where still IE clones.

> Then you have the handheld/smartphone market that was a lot more diverse before Google Android hit the market.

"Then you have the UNIX market that was a lot more diverse before Red Hat Linux hit the market."

I think it will be trivial to prove that Google is actively harming the internet. Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission. If the market decides that a terrible, buggy and enormous runtime is the best way to freely distribute content, then that's what we'll settle on. It's hardly surprising that things got this way, too; locked-down platforms are becoming so normalized that browsers are the only window of freedom users and developers have. It's not like Google or Apple made it any easier to ship native, cross-platform apps in that time, either. So of course users will gravitate to a browser that has more features than their own OS.

So... implicating Google is easy. Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.

Red Hat was created by a new company that had nearly no market share in any market. But having to repeat the mantra that "anti-competition" is all about abuse of market power in one or more other markets is sadly normal.

> Proving that Chromium is anticompetitive for being large and complicated is a suicide mission.

It just happens that all of Googles web properties immediately adopt Chrome only features like the first shadow dom version or outright degrade features on third party browsers. You know small irrelevant services like youtube and maps.

> Trashing Chrome adoption and feature-creep is a different battle entirely.

What would winning this battle look like/achieve?

It's hard to say. My theory is that the demand for complicated browsers is largely reciprocal to the power of your OS. If you have a Chromebook, then your browser is probably less locked-down than your root system. Same thing would happen if Chrome's Blink engine got put on iOS.

Winning that battle would probably look like one of two things:

- Browsers go back to their original goal of being document renderers, and a new wave of local and online APIs fills in the gaps.

- Browsers stay the way they are, but with broken tooling that forces developers into native APIs whether they want it or not.

The monopolistic practices are largely about (IMO) forcing standard adoption to make it impossible to develop new browsers. I suspect competition law is ill equipped to turn that into action, though.

Also, they were dumping a lot of energy into shutting down competition that way instead of making IE not suck.

They aren't really competing if they're just another distribution for Google's web platform. Google doesn't care so much what Chromium browser you use as long as it helps them dictate how the web platform evolves to funnel more money into their coffers and every Chromium browser is doing just that, cementing Google's ultimate and long-term control.

But what does that mean? What is "Google's web platform" in this context, and how does it harm competition? What do you actually want? If Chromium didn't exist, would we have more competition in browsers?

It means that everything about the web, but especially the critical parts like privacy vs surveillance is increasingly and sadly dictated by Google. If you distribute their vision for the web, their literal web platform, Blink, you are harming the web by increasing Google's stranglehold.

And yes, the web would be better served by people building their own, hard forking an existing, or using any of the two or three remaining not-Google solutions. The web would be far better if Google was the only Chromium distribution because we wouldn't have the illusion of a dozen choices that are all just Google's and we'd likely have more and more viable alternatives.