Microsoft has repeatedly shown to have lobbyists working to cause these newsworthy investigations, but they have almost entirely fizzled, because they are little but paid-for press events for Microsoft.

Google was born into Microsoft's monopoly era. They have executed their monopoly in a profoundly different way. They don't have to commit anti-competitive acts to maintain their monopoly.

This is exactly the kind of monopoly we should want.

Except if you read the articles and others linked on this thread, their alleged actions (if true) are clearly anti-competitive. "Give us your content, else we'll demote you in our rankings, which by the way is the biggest source of your traffic"? Really?

While they are usually more subtle about it, I am not very surprised. I personally am aware of at least one deal where they used their size to squeeze a smaller company. Only they called it a "level playing field" (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/level-playing-field/). Sounds so much nicer! Except what it means is, "Our users want to take their data from our service to yours, but it's not 'level', so hey, give us something in return". And of course, who can forget the whole YouTube thing with Zoe Keating.

This has been a trend for a while now, only their PR has been pretty good at covering it up. Like calling it a "level playing field".

> alleged actions (if true) are clearly anti-competitive

I think you may be confusing monopolistic practices with anti-competitive practices. The former does not imply the latter. If Google were also illegally protecting a monopoly (e.g. leveraging monopoly in another market, let's pretend they have an office software monopoly, to protect their monopoly in web search) then we would have a problem, but that hasn't been shown.

> I personally am aware of at least one deal where they used their size to squeeze a smaller company.

Again, the facts would have to show anti-competitive practice and not just being bigger. Are they doing anything unfair like taking a loss in their victim's market, or threatening their vendors?

It seems clear to me that these practices leverage a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market, that is ratings and local reviews.

The actual laws are more involved, including legal theories like "tying" that I can't claim to understand (and I suspect most here can't either) but this looks no different than what Microsoft was accused of doing, which was portrayed as leveraging a desktop OS monopoly to compete in the browser market (as silly as that sounds today).

> a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market, that is ratings and local reviews.

I understand how similar it looks. However, I also note that regulators who are expert in the relevant legal topics have investigated and found no cause for action. Microsoft was not shy about providing all the detail they could to help the investigations in Europe, either.

My best guess is ratings and local reviews are also search, or 'search' isn't a market on paper the way it seems to us as consumers.

Actually, investigators in the US "settled" with Google making some minor changes to their services as concession.(And as TFA implies, these "experts" may have been influenced by Google :-) You'll note that investigations in Europe are not going nearly as well for Google.

...is going to put a hurt on the EU and its citizens.

Fixed it