"We took on Google and they were forced to pay out £2B"

It's 100 million for every year they've been in business, plus massive free positive publicity. Doesn't sound awful, even if very slow arriving.

Edit: they don't in fact get the money? And have been out of business for 8 years. I take it back, this sucks for them.

> basis of an unfair competition case?

It is anti-competitive to kill the competition before you product launch, if you they have active plans to be in the market or already under product development during the same time .

Clearly Google was unable to show that it wasn't the case, the onus is on them to show that they didn't even think they would ever get into this space. It would be ridiculous proposition to prove for them given that information discovery and aggregation has always been core to their search business, any competent product manager was thinking about it 5 years before at-least.

It is not like they killed competition say in mobile OS space in 2005 and then decided to buy Android couple of years laters to build a competitor to Apple and got sued for that, Search and aggregation of other sites is the foundation of their business .

> I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.

The first iteration of comparison shopping on Google, then called Froogle, had launched several years prior to their site.

> Created by Craig Nevill-Manning and launched in December 2002, Froogle was different from most other price comparison services in that it used Google's web crawler to index product data from the websites of vendors instead of using paid submissions.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping

Whatever that point is, it's not in any case relevant to the case at hand. The EU hasn't actually levied that many fines on Google. I think it's three significant cases total in the lifetime of the company, none this decade? (Shopping results in search in 2017, Android in 2018, Ads in 2019, the total fines were about 8B euros). Those numbers are big, and enough to act as a deterrent, but even if I've forgotten about some additional case,m they can't be anywhere near big enough to leave a market where they must be making >10B/year in profit.

You're just thinking it's been more frequent than that, because you keep reading reporting on the same fines over and over, as the case works its way through appeals.

And in case it makes you feel any better, based on these comments you're not the only one getting fooled into thinking that this is news rather than a case that ended in 2017.

Unethical entities being held to account is a good thing, not a bad one. Even the spineless US government is finally reaching their tolerance point and preparing to break Google up.

Yeah but do agree that doing that is not right, correct?

Because it's like saying that we should get rid of human rights as that bogs down the US and EU in terms of manufacturing goods, which contributes to hay China dominates high.

I'd like to be doing well as a country/region AND uphold some sort of shared moral/legal standards.

Sure the EU might make things slow but we do get some top shelf consumer protection with it.

But it wasn’t, which hints that detection models should be adjusted. It’s a judgement in the same category as “he looks criminal”.

See it though the lens of 2005 not 2024. Design standards where different, the reaction of users to banner ads or spam was not the same, SEO was still nascent industry, websites designed to game the engine was very small issue if it existed at all, every website looked like that at the point in time.

Here is how Yahoo still very much juggernaut in 2005 looked https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/yahoo-2005 for context.

No it absolutely doesn't "scream spam" at all. You're just seeing it through 2020s eyes where you assume any site claiming to do price comparisons of broad categories of product couldn't possibly be accurate, impartial, human-curated/checked, not be gamed, swayed by fake/paid reviews, compensated under-the-table or biased by affiliate commissions etc.

You're forgetting very quickly that back in 2006, ~88% of search results were organic and only 12% paid. Things have changed quite quickly.

You speak as if the fine was issued for no reason, or that no assessment of the facts and law were conducted.

Google did abused their position. That was determined to be true in fact finding.

I believe the point of the case is that a similar feature by another Google product wasn't penalized in search results while they were penalized.

Antitrust law does not forbid a company's decision to compete in a new market.

It forbids using your existing monopoly in one market as a weapon against competitors in the new markets you choose to enter.

The conduct that was illegal here was burying their comparison shopping competitor's websites in Google search results, not "making improvements" to something.

> If you are big and improve you get fined

Well, no... You get fined if you make improvements AND use your already big position to bury competition that may compete with your improvement.

Google could've just marketed their option along the competitors but no, they had to get rid of the competitors results in search too, and that's the issue