Is google really a monopoly? You can just use another search engine or email provider.

I would say it has a good moat in the minds of consumers, but not a good moat in reality.

Something people rarely think about in these discussions is that google acquires all of its actual value, its search indexes, by spidering third party sites. Lots of these sites only allow google to scrape them. (This was a thing well before LLMs existed).

Also they have a near monopoly on web advertising.