Yes, this is entirely possible. It's why American law generally centers anti-trust on consumer harm as the litmus test; if those hotel bookings all have to go through one place, and as a result the hotels are too expensive, that's an issue. This is why Amazon gets to exist (but has now been sued in 2023 because the FTC is seeing behavior that is probably rent extraction).

If Google started charging a quarter a coin-flip while leveraging its control over search to suppress the fact you'd made a coin-flip app that was free or flat-rate to purchase, there might be a case there under US law.

I appreciate your comment, it drove me down a rabbit hole :-)

You were right that under the old interpretation, my app had no case. But that rabbit hole led me to the news that the interpretation itself has just been successfully challenged.

Judge Mehta found Google liable. The court has officially validated that the 'free vs. free' self-preferencing that killed my app is, in fact, illegal monopoly maintenance.

Fascinating to see a legal system's 'unhandled exception' get patched in real time.

p.s. Respect for your public comments here :-)