Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.
It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.
The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.
There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.
And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.
That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.
TBH it's the same as Google not linking to other search engines' result pages in its search results. Why would it, when it can link directly the content the user wants?
Presumably Google Shopping will be better at matching users to items and be able to big more than most on average, but 3rd parties can still develop an edge in some niches.
Anyway, the EU wasn't satisfied and fined them another 7bn. And obviously competitors like free traffic, not having to pay Google.
I think they have since started removing rich units for things like Flights/Hotels and trying to figure out what product they are allowed to actually provide in the EU.
But in general, they are just going to keep getting sued forever because they have a strong incentive to find the line on how to monetize search and obviously other aggregators do not like this and have the EU on their side.
In general, operating in the EU seems like a mine field where you have to accept that you're going to get shaken down regularly and do the best you can to thread the needle profitably.
The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL?
It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least shitty option, so if the resolution is "well you have to jumble them now" that's strictly worse for me as a consumer.