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So, their market dominance was established from their web search product. The antitrust ruling was based on them abusing the power that comes with this dominance to stifle competition with their shopping product. While it may be the case that today, Google likes to pile all these things into one integrated product (the user benefit of this being really debatable, even if you personally like it), their market dominance was initially acquired from their web search. If they had historically always been demoting other shopping sites in favour of their own, they would probably not have gotten this dominant at all. One of the features that set Google apart from the other big search engines in its early days was in fact very similar: Other engines would sell rankings and other tricks often favouring profit over relevance. Google didn't do this, partially out of "principle" (which is apparently lost now), partially because their pagerank algorithm was so superior in ranking for relevance that they didn't need to. If they had only returned results for their own shopping business, it wouldn't have gained nearly as much support and wouldn't have been as successful. But because of this established market dominance, they can get away with it today, because everything is integrated, people just google stuff, even if shopping results are heavily skewed towards their own. And not only does this obscure competition, the competition that does appear far down really sucks, and now you have people arguing that Google Shopping is actually in fact better. Google's web search has deteriorated in quality quite a bit, especially for queries related to "integrated Google products", which makes sense because why bother sorting out a web filled with spam for the good bits (like they used to work very hard at) if you can just push your own product instead? Finally, regardless of whether Google likes to integrate and pile everything into one heap, Online Shopping and Web Search are different markets. That's the whole point of this antitrust, just because different businesses in different markets can be grouped under one huge company, doesn't mean it can abuse its market dominance in one market to stifle competition in another. |