It's mostly just fluff, but they do make a good point about the role of Amazon and eBay in product searches. I remember one of the early criticisms of the EU in this case being that they defined the "market" to exclude Amazon and eBay. Anyone know what the EUs reasoning for that is?
> When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That's why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both.
The problem is that when you are shopping for something, you don't want advertisers to be influencing what you see in search results. You generally want the best match to your search, not the product with the biggest advertisement budget behind it.
By upranking others, Google is benefiting themselves, and doing the consumer a disservice. This is what they should be fined for.
But they have a point about Amazon and others doing basically similar things.
So they should remove advertising from google search results altogether?
Like saying TV networks shouldn't put ads/product-placements in their shows because their viewers are only interested in the shows/content.