He did address this by simply stating the fact there is no actual "Google Shopping", it's just a term, like "Google Hotels" or "Google Whatever".

In the end "Google Shopping" is just an Ad Block with a nomenclature of "Google Shopping. They could simply remove this term and put the same ads for Adidas shoes at the top of search results just like do for a myriad of other products and search categories; would that be a problem?

I understand that Google probably has a different engineering platform to present shopping ads/results as opposed to webpages, but is this really any different from other kinds of scraping they perform? They also show song lyrics and snippets from Wikipedia for example. They're scraping the web and collating that info for users to search for.

I think the author made a good case, good read.