As someone who's spent considerable time detaching from, and when that was not entirely feasible simply isolating Google among other big entities: yes it is an effective monopolist and I will add YouTube to the equation.
But it is not the only or necessarily the worst offender, big entities have gobbled many digital fields and used these monopolies to present a relative illusion of choice between other mega entities if they even give that much. But that's another story. See the state of internet access in a majority of the United States, a monopoly between a handful of companies and setting the stage for net neutrality concerns. Funny enough it would seem Eastern Europe has the best deal on this. See Microsoft with its current monopoly for Windows and dominating market position on various techs, see Meta/facebook which monopolizes entire countries and makes using them the only internet option besides composing the majority of used internet worldwide, see apps that try to get away from the Google/Apple dichotomy. See Amazon's snuffing out of small bookstores and forays into web hosting, entrenching themselves as providers of an effective majority in the internet. For that matter CloudFlare has a concerningly large share: benevolent enough for now but competition is fleeting or already massive.
I think this is sort of inevitable, these companies have unprecedented ability to use massive resources to offer convenience at scale. No homebrew shop, website or independent effort can compete with competently directed resources put together to make something that has never been seen in human history, only mirrored in the monopolies and efficiency of ancient days that made the most of their means at the time and became dominant until something truly new came along. They will continue to expand and extinguish competition unless sufficient pressure is put upon them to step on the brakes and society catches up.
By creating big structures and making them the effective default, these companies dominate the field and to remove them is to remove conveniences that become expected in the lives of millions of people. So I expect there to be more of this as time goes on and new struggles that come with being pushed into more connected, centralized systems unless a solar flare or worldwide EMP snuffs it all out and makes it start over. Or massive government intervention, what have you. I'll go back to Google now.
Your search engine options in the lead are Google or, distantly, Bing. Don't like it? Switch to something that hardly anyone uses and is not very good, or use a frontend that... wait... depends on Google or Bing to do anything.
Don't like YouTube? Use any number of obscure irrelevant services that will never get the traction of YouTube videos when the algorithm is in a good mood. If you just want to host a video file yeah, you've got options, if you want anything more than that your options are negligible. Switching is effortless, switching your audience? I invite you to actually look into this if you think it is in any way that simple. It's only feasible if your audience is mom, pop and a sympathy friend. Or maybe ultra far righters on bitchute...
Google dumps hundreds of millions into Firefox to prop it up and everything else is Chrome with paint, which is working well for them when they want to push a manifest that neuters adblocking.
Arantor gets it, plenty of examples. So in so many words, yes.
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