I think you’re missing the point about antitrust and competition. It’s about abusing your power to prevent potential competitors from competing on the merits. Paying to be a default means hardly anybody will ever see your competitors product.

If everybody was able to easily see Google’s results vs competitors it’s likely they would try harder and wouldn’t have just spent all their effort on cramming more ads above the results.

Unfortunately not trying hard isn’t illegal. Paying for placement is not illegal either, that’s pretty much what advertising is. And what Google will argue, in the case of websearch, is that the problem is hard which is what drives your perception that they have failed to maintain quality and switching is trivially easy, but no one does because.. the competition is worse. I daily drive Bing and in aggregate it’s approximately the same level of bad as google.

If you were to address the online advertising market, we would have a lot more to agree on. But you didn’t, and the article seems a bit confused about the ongoing cases (search filed in 2021 vs ads filed recently) and IMO is mostly written to rile the proles.

It is for *a judge* to decide if it is illegal or not. That’s kinda the point of a trial.