It's dangerous for us all to be so dependent on a few companies. I doubt that's what motivates the DoJ in this case, but right now, if you have a problem with Google, you have to post a cri de coeur on Twitter or Hacker News and hope it embarrasses somebody at Google enough to take action on your behalf.
More competitors in the advertising and search space would certainly help, or at least keep the situation from getting worse.
As for Amazon, the antitrust enforcers should have come down on them like a ton of bricks the moment it appeared that they were leveraging internal business intelligence to compete with their own sellers. I use Amazon constantly, I have an enormous amount of respect for them, and I value their services a great deal, but come on. There's no point in even having antitrust laws if they don't apply in this instance.
Re: Amazon, many companies do the same thing (e.g. CVS, Target, Costco). With Costco in particular, Kirkland products are higher quality and cheaper than the competition in almost all categories they are in, which is a benefit to me as a consumer. Should Kirkland be broken off just because other companies can't compete with it? If not, what's the justification for Amazon?
I don't see why not, but admittedly I haven't thought it through any further than that.
The comparison with store brands doesn't really work because Costco and Sam's and Target don't invite third-party sellers to build their businesses on what amounts to sharecropped shelf space. Procter & Gamble and Berkshire Hathaway can hold their own in any negotiations with Costco and Amazon. For small businesses, the situation is more like the complaints we always hear about Apple's app store, where the company buys or builds their own first-party competitors in categories that prove unexpectedly successful.
Dirty pool, but legal enough... at least as long as you (a) don't hold a monopoly on distribution, or aspire to do so; and (b) didn't just get back from Washington, DC where you told Congress that you didn't do this. Both of these factors are problematic with Amazon, IMO. It's true that they don't hold a monopoly on distribution, technically speaking, but where else are third-party sellers supposed to turn?
The total ownership of virtually all the data for a huge percentage of the population could be argued to be a high price, depending on your perspective.
Google has many competitors in the data gathering business. If you combine the few big tech companies data gathering it is a significant portion thereof, but the fact that you have to combine them means any one is not a monopoly by itself.
