It's about exploitive behavior. Note that your example, valve, hasn't been sued successfully about monopolistic behaviour as they don't try to shut down competition, they just remain better than their competition, which is how it's supposed to work.

But shitty businesses who lose customers start interfering in the ability of others to compete with them. F.i. Google cutting a deal with Reddit to be the only search engine to index the site.

Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well.

The problem isn't that it does it well, it's that it did it well and it doesn't anymore.

They dominate the market and can afford to make the search AI-inflated bullshit without any revenue losses.

Another part of the problem is the integration. Some google websites are rendered inoperable on Firefox, while others are made to have a worse experience.

A third part is giving its services preferential treatment onstead of having thekr algorithm be unbiased towards in-house services.

Edit:

Once upon a time the best browser game in town was Internet explorer. Similar stuff happened (actually even less blatant then Google). Microsoft basically controlled Web standards. The biggest sin they did was bundle IE with Windows, at least according to the US suit.

The problem is not having the monopoly, it's exploiting it's qualities. Google for example exploits the fact that they know how much ad revenue each site makes them and thus can rank them higher. They also can rank their own products such as YouTube or Chrome. Another exploitation of their monopoly is that Google is the default search engine of Chrome instead of giving the user choices

There is no issue with YouTube, another monopoly, since it's business model is driving engagement and making money from ads but not exploiting its position.

Valve is another monopoly but it doesn't block people from putting their own launchers onto their platform. It doesn't block you from installing another store like Apple does and in general is nowhere near as all-encompassing as Google.

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

For the record Valve is very much not a monopoly. They have very big competitors including Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and more recently GOG.

I'm with you on this.

In this thread are people who screams monopoly, thinking they know what it means. One comment said Google is a monopoly, followed by "along with "

They're giants because they're successful and good at what they do. They're successful because people are benefiting and find values from the products they use. The moment these giants stops "exploiting" people will be when they stop bringing values to society.

They've confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.