Well, yeah, exactly, that's what the guys on Naked Capitalism have been saying for a while. Even if they establish their monopoly there is no barrier to entry for new competitors.
That moat only holds out aspiring competitors who compete using the same game Google plays. The person who can come up with a way to show you a grommet when you're thinking cloth clamp will break Google. How many times have you searched for an algorithm, knowing it exists, but not knowing its name? Search is still very broken, and after 20 years of Google is very ripe for disruption.
I think that's the point, though. To compete (as a new entrant) with Uber+Lyft, wouldn't you need to build infrastructure, win mindshare with drivers + passengers, and all the other things that Lyft and Uber have been spending years doing?
The argument of the 10-part series they put out on Uber is that main expense is the actual transportation, and you can't achieve meaningful economies of scale, which is the reason that livery services never expanded beyond regional monopolies previously. Relatively speaking the software is a commodity (and traditional taxi services remain competitors to Uber anyway -- likely more attractive in many cases if you take away the subsidized price difference).
And also Uber (more than Lyft) it's by far the major player, it's entrenched in people's imagination as the representative of the very service it provides, and it just works.
"Call an Uber" is as idiomatic today as "Google something".
