In a good article about Google’s status as a monopoly, Vauhini Vara makes the following important point:

According to the people familiar with the investigation, Google got off the hook largely because, however the company might have harmed competitors, the F.T.C. found that its behavior, by and large, hadn’t hurt competition or, by extension, consumers. (The distinction between harm to competitors and harm to competition is an important one: according to the modern interpretation of antitrust law, even if a business hurts individual competitors, it isn’t seen as breaking antitrust law unless it has also hurt the competitive process—that is, that it has taken actions that, for instance, raised prices or reduced choices, over all, for consumers.)

I often have to remind students that in the United States, it’s not illegal to be a monopoly; instead, it’s illegal to abuse your status as a monopoly. The quotation above seems like a good adjunct to that statement.