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So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides?
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.
It seems hard to cure because a lot of this is stuff that just probably shouldn’t be done. Ie the structure of the products veers so close to anti-competitive practices that it’s just untenable in the face of regulatory enforcement.
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.
Iirc Google's solution to this was to make the top of page shopping panel something companies could bid on and then conduct arms length auctions where Google Shopping and its competitors get to bid.
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.
I think the ideal solution is to split up google.
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.
Google would say they aren't preferencing their product. They are preferencing the merchants who actually sell the products over middlemen who try to extract rents from said merchants. Because they put free links to merchants' product pages in search 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?
It's not about BNPL, it's about a price comparison service. The same thing exists in travel where Google competes with its own customers and has majorly changed the industry.
There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.
I'd imagine this is about the presence of the google shopping bar you get above the results, like this: https://imgur.com/a/1drEnrm
People aren't going to like this, but taking a page from Apple, Microsoft, Sony (iPhone, Xbox, Playstation), the solution to constant antitrust charges stemming from competitors on your platform....is to kick them off the platform. You can't be anti-competitive if you have no competitors.
Pretty sure Google would loose its search business if Google search only contained websites owned by Google.
Because of the introduction of AI overview, click-through rates are dropping like crazy. Up to 70% of Google searches now end without any clicks to third party websites. So most search users already stay completely within Google's ecosystem.
That is even more obviously anti-competitive.
Not that we've seen any effective enforcement against it...
Sony, Nintendo never had any pretense. If you want to be on their system, you basically have to go in and have a personal job interview to be on their system and they make no bones about it that it’s their system, and you’re there for as long as they want you there. Originally Apple was going to be a closed system and originally was just gonna have web apps, but a whole bunch of developers beg them to open up a store and a few years later, a few of the big companies were crying because Apple was successful and wanted special treatment.
In reality, how many different apps do you need? Do you need 3 million apps? One can probably get by with 50,000 apps. It would still basically be the same in terms of user experience. Most users wouldn’t even know the difference. The only people crying would be other businesses. who want to latch on.
Note: Sony Nintendo over the years get very helpful people, so-called experts who say they must change the way they do things to conform with everyone else, but they never do. still in business, and still kicking Microsoft’s ass.
Epic games sued both Apple and Google for anti-competitive behavior on the respective platforms.
Google was ruled a monopoly, Apple was not. Every took notes.
Right? Like the through line for all of this stuff is limp and ineffective enforcement.
Fines need to start doubling for every time one of these companies reoffend.
This comes years after this fine was upheld about Google shopping in an EU court. I guess prisjakt (another Swedish website that works just like pricerunner) could do the same now.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac...
Klarna bought pricerunner for just under a billion 5 years ago, pretty good deal.
This decision is a direct consequence of the EU decision, Pricerunner applied the precedent from that case and claimed that Google discriminated against them in the same way. (https://www.delphi.se/eu-competition-blog/private-enforcemen..., https://www.domstol.se/nyheter/2026/07/google-is-to-pay-dama...)
The problem is Google/Apple and these people that
self-identify as platforms" should probably divest from providing any 1st party services on their "platforms".
What Europe needs to do is actually compete. China appears to be successfully competing so much so in certain areas the United States had to ban certain things.
There is no reason why there can’t be a search engine or any other major service or hardware system originating from Europe other than all the red tape, the EU puts in the way they kill small companies before they even get a chance to get bigger You can’t come up with a new idea and monetize it if you have to make it open to everyone from the start.
Arm processors, for example, originated in the EU, the EU, or I should say Europe, has Linux, and there have been other pioneering forms of technology and software and hardware over the years, but the environment in the EU kills off small companies. You can’t share everything at the beginning of a company’s life.
I’m still waiting for Linux on the desktop, Linux running on Arm computers sold by a company with both hardware and software working together as one in a user-friendly manner to the average person, you go to a store or you go online, you buy it, you take it home, you use it. On day one, within the first ten minutes of plugging it in, there really is no excuse.
After thirty-five years, of not having something workable for the average person to use, and there again, I don’t mean what is currently out there which is nothing, And no, it’s not Apple’s responsibility or Nvidia or AMD to make that happen where is that new European start-up up?
Forcing companies of any size to give free infrastructure rides isn’t the way to compete in any industry.
The actual reason for China success is a lot more red tape, whenever an American or European company wants in. Oftentimes, allowing them in only if they give up trade secrets and technologies. To be like China, EU needs to go harder against American companies and then use it as a bargaining chip.
Also, Europe does not have Linux. It does not own it and linux is not exclusive to Europe.
China successfully competed by insisting on a framework of "forced technology transfer" and joint venture requirements. To access the Chinese market, US firms were nearly always required to share proprietary technology and intellectual property with local Chinese partners.
Also, do recall the "Great Firewall". And kindly remember that Social Media, Communications, Search & Information, News Outlets, etc were all banned.
All this protected domestic innovation and the domestic market.
Good for China - this is what all nations trading with the US should have done to avoid extreme US monopoly and influence. China is the nation smiling while the boots of the American Big Bully and Bigger American Oligarchs have become rather tiresome.
No. Platforms are better when the owners of them continue to invest directly in & improve the user experience. Turning them into white label runtimes for apps is something only nerds & bureaucrats with visions of grandeur dream of.
Klarna is a buy-now-pay-later company, right? How do they compete with google?
This case is about a subsidiary of them called Pricerunner, which is a price-comparison platform.
They bought the website pricerunner.com which aggregates prices from webshops, like google shopping.
This case was about PriceRunner, a price comparison platform that was suffering from Google prioritizing its own platform in search results. Klarna just happens to be the owner.
Wondering if Google can take out a BNPL plan to cover the damages
This is effectively just a tariff. An extremely large and disproportionate fine on a foreign company so that the local company has a better chance to compete.
This is one of the Price Runner sites: https://www.pricerunner.com/ And this is Google Shopping: https://www.google.com/search?q=laptops&sca_esv=a6fae943e924...
Google gave its own price comparison service favorable treatment in search results, thereby abusing their dominance in the search market:
"Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible."
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_17_...
It is similar to Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices of the 1990's. There is no legal uncertainty at all -- Google must have know that its conduct was illegal and deserve to pay hundreds of billions in punitive damages.
Didn't Google have a previous lawsuit against foundem? Not a fan of Google but foundem were fucking awful.
Not like klarna are nice
$1.5B is significant, but the bigger question is whether this actually changes how dominant platforms rank their own services.
Is this real accountability for anti-competitive behaviour, or just another cost of doing business for Big Tech?
My cynicism is tell me that unfortunately it is the latter.
IMO the fines do have an effect - Google now withholds a lot of launches from the EU, sometimes temporarily until they have time to have lawyers check them against DMA requirements, but mostly permanently. Ironically the part of Google most likely to persist in launching for the EU is Ads, since money is at stake. All the free, consumer-benefiting services are most likely to be curtailed in the face of aggressive regulation.
They do treat it as a "cost of doing business" as they do hedge between making a bigger profit through such violations vis the possible fine. But enforced fines like these serve as a warning that the government / regulator / judiciary are serious about enforcing laws and upholding rights. That precedent does discourages such actions because they know future violations will invite similar actions (the punitive fines may be worse for repeat violations) thus making the risks higher. The counter to that is political lobbying, if it is cheaper than the fines, and is also treated as another "cost of doing business".
(Even India has fined them 100s of millions of dollars - https://ssrana.in/articles/google-fined-anti-competitive-pra... ).
Absolute numbers with BigTech are never significant. Only viable paths for remedy anre outright divestment or revoking financial license in Sweden.
The former is nigh impossible, the latter is fairly trivial with sufficient will.
It is not like you typically can just ignore a court order so Google will need to convince Klarna that they have changed something or Klarna can just go back to the court.
It was about behavior 9 years ago
Internet wont be human steered by the time this is over
Just agents running x402 payments over mcp servers
Vouched, I feel similarly.
(I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted.
The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)
> PriceRunner is considered to have suffered damage as a result of Google having illegally favoured its price comparison service for many years
Why would Google NOT favor it's own service at it's own product? How is that illegal?
When you're a permitted monopoly you have the behave differently, including being fair to competitors.
1.5B is preferable to being broken up (not that Sweden could enforce that)
Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.
It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.
The thing that is illegal is leveraging a monopoly position in one market to give yourself an advantage in another market.
So Google is allowed to favour their own price comparison in, say, Hangouts, but not in Search.
Why would Swedish courts NOT favor their own national economic interests? How is that illegal?
It is illegal to use your monopoly in one area to unfairly distort the market in another. This is one of the core concepts of antitrust law.
Have you been sleeping under a rock for 30+ years, don’t know what antitrust is, and still feel confident enough to shout about it in a comment?
The law isn’t just “what you happen to intuitively think is right”, especially in a jurisdiction where you clearly do not reside.
something something monopoly. Even US has laws about this, currently not enforced though.
Why would Microsoft NOT favor its own products? How is that illegal?
"Why would Microsoft NOT favor it's own browser in it's own OS? How is that illegal?"