Sounds like a local problem. Even my parent’s small town in south GA has a choice between AT&T Fiber with symmetric 1GB up/down and the cable company.

> You can ride a horse. Ergo, not a monopoly.

Are you really saying that there is no other search engine you can use besides Google?

No, they're saying their is an alternative, but it comes at a huge disadvantage. Perhaps not for individual users, as a DDG and Firefox user I'm quite content, but it's definitely an overwhelming disparity for website admins. Even if that admin is not literally in Google Analytics to view their site data (and they probably are), they're still looking at an overwhelming majority of organic traffic coming from Google Search using Google Chrome. And for site publishers and advertisers, Google AdSense or Google Ad[Word]s are enormous.

In 1870, if you wanted to get from Chicago to San Francisco, it would be facetious to claim that Union Pacific did not have a monopoly on that route. No, Union Pacific wasn't forcing you to board their train. Just like you can Ctrl+T over to duckduckgo.com/ or bing.com/ or kagi.com/ in seconds, and never go back to Google. You could avoid the railroad monopoly by 'just' riding a horse, or walking, or taking a boat down the Mississippi and launching a sailing expedition around Cape Horn. That's still a monopoly.

That’s a horrible argument. The difference between riding a horse and riding a train is multiple orders of magnitude. The difference between using an alternate search engine is minimum and the experience is often better than Google.

And if your entire business strategy is to have a website and depend on Google search results to drive traffic, you are doing it wrong as many news organizations like Buzzfeed found out.

I do occasional self promotion and “thought leadership” bullshit to put my name out there. I go to where the eyeballs are - LinkedIn. It’s far more likely that the people I want to reach are on LinkedIn than my blog that I don’t have a link to anywhere. I just use it as a publicly accessible place to workshop my writing and thoughts before I post them to LinkedIn.

And I will play the world’s smallest fiddle for advertisers even then, if you have a product to sale to consumers, you are probably better off using Amazon or a Meta app to advertised. It’s better targeting and ads are less likely to be blocked.