Lots of misinformation in this post. It is almost hard to pick a spot to start.

>Google provided a search engine that worked better than any other so people started using it.<

While at the beginning this may have been true, over time that search engine has grown more parasitic in terms of things like scrape-n-displace knowledge graph results, AdWords ads on branded keyword terms where ads with junk bundleware rank above official sites, etc.
http://blog.brandverity.com/2738/software-bundlers-target-br...

>People are still using it because it's still better than the others.<

Care to explain why Google is spending over a billion Dollars a year buying default search placement in other browsers like iOS & Mozilla Firefox? Any thoughts on the Flash security updates which hit other browsers and bundle Chrome's web browser in with it? Or how about the Android contracts with default search placement (and other forms of) bundling baked into them?

Google is spending well over a billion Dollars a year on the thesis that your thesis is wrong.

>It's not a monopoly.<

The hell it's not. At least if we use any of the standard definitions.

>You can use another search engine if you want to.<

And while an informed individual may choose to, the majority of people are driven by default settings which are purchased, as per the above.

>The site that emailed to get a link taken down employed an SEO agency to improve their rankings and they created a bunch of spammy links to try to manipulate Google into ranking that site higher than others that probably deserve to rank higher due to their content.<

Are you suggesting there are not false positives, or that competitors do not buy links to torch their competitors? Either such assertion is simply untrue.

>They got the warning because their link profile suggested that it was obvious they had been trying to manipulate rankings, not because they had one or two iffy ones.<

The second they there presumes a competitor didn't do them for it. Only a person ignorant of the field of SEO would presume this to be true in all cases.

>Re, the nofollow aspect. Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop. Nofollow was in place before there was any notion that who you linked to could harm you. Sites like Wikipedia and others were only too happy to add nofollow to links because it put spammers off from crapifying their sites.<

This is a complete misunderstanding of history, on numerous levels.

Nofollow was introduced as a (ineffective) solution to blog comment spamming. To help aid further/wider adoption, at some point some Googler's even suggested things like pagerank sculpting could be useful, up until some large sites started doing it excessively. They were looking for reasons to justify its widespread use, because Google intended from day one that the tag could then be spread onto paid links & other links they didn't want to count.

And the other level of absolute misunderstanding was that (before Google went on their fearmongering campaign about links) they in the past suggested that you couldn't control who links to you, but you could control who you link to & sites which linked to bad neighborhoods could indeed be penalized for it.

Very rarely is there a comment which is that long & that wrong. Impressive!