You edited to include additional claims, and some counterfactuals. I see no reason to believe that the anti-trust rulings against Microsoft, which were actually rather weak when all was said and done, is what allowed Google to come into existence. I don't see how they had any effect on Google, or how Google was stymied by Microsoft's monopoly. Can you substantiate that claim?
Likewise, you have to prove that these companies are destroying the ability for other folks to innovate through abuse of monopoly power (the point of the hearings), not just say that they're big so we need to "break them up".
"I see no reason to believe that the anti-trust rulings against Microsoft, which were actually rather weak when all was said and done, is what allowed Google to come into existence."
Microsoft's behavior changed a lot once they got under pressure from the US and the EU. During the 90s they were much more heavy handed and aggressive than after.
A number of Microsoft employees have confirmed that the main reason Microsoft never did anything to stop Google's growth when it was small was fear of further antitrust punishments:
And most important, as Microsoft lived under government scrutiny, employees abandoned what had been nascent internal discussions about crushing a young, emerging competitor — Google. There had been informal conjectures about reprogramming Microsoft’s web browser, the popular Internet Explorer, so that anytime people typed in “Google,” they would be redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders. Or, perhaps a warning message might pop up: “Did you know Google uses your data in ways you can’t control?”
Microsoft was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. “But there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn’t want to get in trouble again, so nothing happened,” Burrus said. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government’s antitrust lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft’s monopoly.
As an HN user, I assume you are probably familiar with dozens of projects for products or services that were superior to Google's entrenched ones. Be they alternative mobile OSes, search engines, email or calendar products, etc. But thanks to monopoly power, all of them have failed to gain traction from the incumbents due to their vertical integration with the rest of their product portfolio.
Gmail is not the best email client (it's not even a particularly good email client now that it takes two minutes to load), Android is far from the best mobile OS. But both are dominant because of the inescapable monopoly which owns them and every other product people use online. Google Search isn't winning because of the quality of the code or the results, but because Google has invested billions of dollars every year in ensuring the default search on nearly every electronic device is Google. No matter how superior someone's product is, if they don't have Google's scale or their billions, they can't compete.
Fair enough. Note, I'm not arguing that there is no appropriate use of FTC action to stop anti-competitive behavior. The informally discussed actions attributed to MSFT employees would probably qualify (certainly using browser monopoly to effectively block websites). However, it never happened and "informal conjectures" are pretty dubious. I don't think that rises to the standard of evidence that Google wouldn't exist had the FTC not intervened.
From the same article
What eventually humbled Bill Gates and ended Microsoft’s monopoly wasn’t antitrust prosecutions, observers say, but a more nimble start-up named Google, a search engine designed by two Stanford Ph.D. dropouts that outperformed Microsoft’s own forays into search (first MSN Search and now Bing). Then those two dropouts introduced a series of applications, like Google Docs and Google Sheets, that eventually began to compete with almost every aspect of Microsoft’s businesses. And Google did all that not by relying on government prosecutors but by being smarter. You don’t need antitrust in the digital marketplace, critics argue. “When our products don’t work or we make mistakes, it’s easy for users to go elsewhere because our competition is only a click away,” Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, said in 2012. Translation: The government ought to stop worrying, because no online giant will ever survive any longer than it deserves to.
I am certainly familiar with alternative options to popular digital products. Some of them do in fact gain adoption, which seems to counter your position that it's impossible to gain traction because of monopoly power. They often get bought by the incumbent (Facebook's properties being the most obvious example). Note that some independents (Snapchat, Twitter) have also managed to rise post-Facebook and IPO. It's not clear monopoly power is what makes these supposedly subpar products dominant. Certainly I use Google Calendar because I use GMail, and I use GMail because I don't care enough to look for another email provider. It's good enough for me. If a better one came out, worth switching to, I certainly would. Just like I switched my email from Yahoo! to GMail when GMail came out. I think there's a difference between a company being big and holding the lion's share of the market (Tide holds 50% market share in laundry detergent) and being a monopoly. Telecoms and utilities are monopolies, in many markets. There are no other options. I don't see why Google Search is (DuckDuckGo exists and has done pretty well with a focus on privacy, for example; and of course Bing). But I also disagree that it's _not_ because Google has the best search results. As far as I can tell, they do. Who's better?
Bing and DuckDuckGo both have vastly better search products (for different reasons). DDG obviously has a strong privacy push, and allows you to grab results from different search engines in a private way, Bing pays for your searching there with rewards.
Results quality is incredibly similar, and in fact, several times I've read hyped up announcement articles about new Google Knowledge Graph features or tools like the metronome when you search "metronome", only to notice that Bing already had that functionality already. Google isn't really the innovator in search and hasn't been for a long time. But given that they pay billions to both Apple and Mozilla to be the default search on iOS and Firefox, and also control the largest mobile OS, Android, Google remains mostly uncontested for the 90% or higher market share it has in a lot of countries.
Defaults win, we've seen time and time again. Google didn't explode in popularity because people set it as their search engine. Sure, nerds like us did back then, but what happened was Adobe Flash Player and similar apps started installing the Google Toolbar, which changed your default search engine to Google. And this is why the EU has finally taken a move to prevent Google from making Android manufacturers default to Google Search, though it's likely most will still be paid to provide that default going forward.
Likewise, you have to prove that these companies are destroying the ability for other folks to innovate through abuse of monopoly power (the point of the hearings), not just say that they're big so we need to "break them up".