The argument has been made that Google's free products and services are anticompetitive dumping which makes it harder for a competing service to survive.

The same argument has been made against OSS. Google's products are free like broadcast TV. They are selling access to you via their services to marketers.

Only if your privacy is worthless.

"Its kind of like the argument for the minimum wage - conservatives would say its not needed because you can just choose not to work for a company that isn't offering enough money, but sometimes you don't really have an alternative."

Not a good analogy, because the full "conservative" (and libertarian) argument is that if you find yourself in such a situation, minimum wage laws produce a discontinuity in the labor market: if the current value of your labor is less than the minimum wage, you won't get a job at all.

Associate with this is the idea that it's better to have a job, any job ... the fate of the long term unemployed we're seeing right now as they lose general job skills is telling.

Completely related, if you're just starting out, and the value of your labor is not yet at the minimum wage, you never get into the job market in the first place. You never learn those implicit general jobs skills and discipline, like showing up to work on time. (OK, you just might find a place in the underground economy, but forcing people into that is very, very bad.)

It's the successful pulling up the ladder behind them ... something people like us rarely see (well, until we're 35-40 and unemployable for standard salaried programming positions). And therefore utterly evil.

Any way to bring this back to the general conversation?

First, the government does not have its thumbs on the scales: you will not go to jail for just trying to compete with Google,

And is it really that impossible to compete with Google in plenty of big places? Companies like Fastmail suggest it isn't (speaking from personal experience). That Duck Duck Go can even get some mind share is suggestive. What about Apple's mapping stuff?

There's also regression to the mean, which I sure see Google doing. I use them only for search and maps (punted Docs when they started going Google+ account name etc. crazy), and their search is steadily becoming less useful/harder to get what I want. I am a ringer in that I've been doing full text search stuff since the very early 90s, but....

So I suggest not making an entirely static analysis of this. Google today: hard to impossible ... to almost trivially easy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7467165). Google tomorrow? Probably better chances. Google in the next decade ... well, the way to bet is that at some point we'll be picking over its bones. Within my expected lifespan, at least.

And the conservative/libertarian argument fails, as Adam Smith notes in Wealth of Nations, because:

• The fully-realized cost of labor is that which allows it to survive and support its family, and educate its progeny. A business which cannot afford to pay a living wage is effectively demanding a societal subsidy. While there are circumstances in which that social welfare might be reasonably extended, it seems to me that it's a decision which should be made deliberately, and that companies which show recurring high levels of profit while being unwilling to pay a living wage are prima facie proof of a market failure.

• The inherent negotiating advantage of employers means that it will virtually always prevail in wage negotiations with labor.

• There's a common misperception that people are paid what they're worth to a company. This isn't the case. Rather: in a well-functioning and competitive market, your wage will always be less than you're worth. Much as a manufacturer's printer PPM rating is best interpreted as "performance never to be exceeded", your true worth to a company always sets an absolute ceiling on what your pay will be. Exceptions exist where markets are not well-functioning: e.g., in the case of excecutive pay, where there's a strong level of capture between execs and payment committees, and in which pay serves not only a compensation but a market signalling role as to the health and robustness of the firm (it's effectively a social signaling Veblen good).

For all of these reasons, defining a minimum wage at roughly the level of a living wage is strongly congruent with Adam Smith's principles. See Chapter X, Book I, Wealth of Nations.

Two points.

1. Google fought then-giants such as AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo in the process of establishing itself as the leader in search space. The incumbents had economies of scale and (relatively) massive amounts of data to crunch through. Yet a Google happened!

2. ``Google's very existence makes it harder for similar services to exist." History has proved time and again that such a premise is false. When it does become false, it is usually because of `dissimilar' disruptions in the landscape.

1. You are somewhat comparing apples to organges here. Google had access to the exact same websites as AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo, so it's obvious that they could build an alternative search engine using the same data. But if you tried building an alternative email provider, you would not have access to the mails stored at google for training your spam filter.

2. You are contradicting yourself. "When it does become false" implies that it is true at some point, i.e., that there are hurdles to overcome, that is to say, that it is harder for a similar service to exist. Noone says that it is impossible, just that it is harder, and the form that that usually takes is precisely that it takes what you call "dissimilar disruptions" to establish an alternative. Having to come up with a "dissimilar disruptions" obviously is harder that coming up with some small evolutionary improvement.

I think your reference to minimum wage is a little tenuous at best. The thing about technology is that it keeps progressing and eliminates barriers to entry. Yes, Google has a lot of machines, but now, without a lot of capital you can run a competing service without even having to own hardware. Yes, it's hard to write good spam filters, but Open Source Software allows you to get access to code that others have written which may be of similar quality, or at least give you a leg up on writing your own.

So yes, Google gets a temporary lock on mindset and technology, but as technology progresses there open up new opportunities to unseat the incumbents. If you'd asked anyone 10 or 20 years ago whether Microsoft could be unseated, they would have said you were crazy. The same goes for Google. With technology, nothing is permanent. Either you innovate, or you get left behind.