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According to The Wall Street Journal:
The European Union's antitrust regulator on Tuesday fined Alphabet Inc.'s Google a record €2.42 billion ($2.71 billion) for favoring its own comparison-shopping service in search results and ordered the search giant to apply the same methods to rivals as its own when displaying their services.
[...] If the ruling sets a precedent that holds, these firms might all have to rethink how they make products that—like Google's search engine—have become more than just tools, but dominant gateways to the wider internet.
From The New York Times:
While the fine will garner attention, the focus will most likely shift quickly to the changes that Google will have to make to comply with the antitrust decision, potentially leaving it vulnerable to regular monitoring of its closely guarded search algorithm.
CNBC adds that, based on a filing, Google expects to ultimately pay this fine.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 28 2017, @10:34AM (2 children)
The original complaints were from various "comparison shopping" sites. IIRC, the very first complaint was from Foundem [foundem.co.uk].
I am personally very happy that comparison-shopping sites do not appear at the top of the search results. There's nothing more annoying than searching for a product and landing on a crappy comparison-shopping site. First, they do not contain any useful product information. Second, they aren't even useful for shopping: the retailers have to "pay to play", and more often than not the prices are not real, but rather some sort of "bait and switch". De-ranking these sites is Google search doing its job.
Google's mistake was placing their own comparison-shopping results on the search page. This genuinely was unfair, even if the results were probably equally crappy (dunno, never used them). They have since moved their results to a separate tab, where they are more easily ignored. That said, a 10-digit fine seems a bit ridiculous, no?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:15AM
Depends on whether they were warned already not to do that, and did it anyway.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday June 28 2017, @07:21PM
The mistake was that they did so to expressly promote their own Google Shopping results.
A couple years after launch, the Google Shopping service was, in Google's own wording(*), 'going nowhere'. From that moment on, rival comparison shopping services systematically turned up on average on page 4 of Google's own search results.
* internal email traffic