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In an Open Letter To EU's Competition Commissioner, 14 European Shopping Comparison Services Say Google is Not Making the Search For Products Fairer (bbc.com)
Google is not complying with European demands that it must make the search for products fairer, rivals say. In an open letter to the EU's Competition Commissioner on Thursday, they wrote: We are writing to you as leading European comparison shopping services (CSSs) to express our collective view that Google's "compliance mechanism" in the Google Search (Comparison Shopping) case does not comply with the European Commission's June 2017 Prohibition Decision. It has now been more than a year since Google introduced its auction-based "remedy", and the harm to competition, consumers and innovation caused by Google's illegal conduct has continued unabated. We therefore respectfully urge you to commence non-compliance proceedings against Google. BBC offers some background: In June 2017, European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager ruled that Google had abused its power by promoting its own shopping service at the top of search results, and demanded that it provide equal treatment to rival comparison sites in future. She issued a record fine of $2.7bn -- the largest penalty the European Commission has ever imposed. She also demanded that Google end its anti-competitive practices within 90 days or face further costs. Google is still appealing against the fine, but has come up with a system that it says makes shopping fairer. It changed the shopping box, which is displayed at the top of search results, so that it is no longer populated with just Google Shopping ad results, but gives space to other shopping comparison services, who can bid for advertising slots.
Can't say I like the way google has been going lately but Google's business is part helping people find things, part pointing them at particular things, why in hell anyone would think they should be forced to host their competitors in their place of business is a complete mystery.
Should they give free adds to Amazon ? After all Amazon serves as a shopping service ? What about Ebay ?
The EU has always been horribly obvious about being bought and paid for by European aristocrats, the ancien regime that never really went away, this is just a further attempt by them to shakedown a deep pocket.
"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." -- Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 1998.
The people complaining aren't stores they're "comparison" sites, aka sites that have a bunch of generated pages with referral links. These sites were a plague before Google started lowering their page rankings.