[prepend]

It is quite conspiratorial. It’s really hard for Google to prove they didn’t do this as it’s proving a negative.

I think the argument boils down to since they are capable of doing so, and no one would be able to tell if they did; therefore search must be open to prevent such potential actions.

Google has been caught doing things like favoring inferior shopping searches to point to their own products. So maybe it is possible to detect and not as much of a risk.