It seems hard to cure because a lot of this is stuff that just probably shouldn’t be done. Ie the structure of the products veers so close to anti-competitive practices that it’s just untenable in the face of regulatory enforcement.

Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.

It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.

The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.

Iirc Google's solution to this was to make the top of page shopping panel something companies could bid on and then conduct arms length auctions where Google Shopping and its competitors get to bid.

Presumably Google Shopping will be better at matching users to items and be able to big more than most on average, but 3rd parties can still develop an edge in some niches.

Anyway, the EU wasn't satisfied and fined them another 7bn. And obviously competitors like free traffic, not having to pay Google.

I think they have since started removing rich units for things like Flights/Hotels and trying to figure out what product they are allowed to actually provide in the EU.

But in general, they are just going to keep getting sued forever because they have a strong incentive to find the line on how to monetize search and obviously other aggregators do not like this and have the EU on their side.

In general, operating in the EU seems like a mine field where you have to accept that you're going to get shaken down regularly and do the best you can to thread the needle profitably.

I think the ideal solution is to split up google.

And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.

That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.

It's not about BNPL, it's about a price comparison service. The same thing exists in travel where Google competes with its own customers and has majorly changed the industry.

There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.

I'd imagine this is about the presence of the google shopping bar you get above the results, like this: https://imgur.com/a/1drEnrm

Pretty sure Google would loose its search business if Google search only contained websites owned by Google.

That is even more obviously anti-competitive.

Not that we've seen any effective enforcement against it...

What Europe needs to do is actually compete. China appears to be successfully competing so much so in certain areas the United States had to ban certain things.

There is no reason why there can’t be a search engine or any other major service or hardware system originating from Europe other than all the red tape, the EU puts in the way they kill small companies before they even get a chance to get bigger You can’t come up with a new idea and monetize it if you have to make it open to everyone from the start.

Arm processors, for example, originated in the EU, the EU, or I should say Europe, has Linux, and there have been other pioneering forms of technology and software and hardware over the years, but the environment in the EU kills off small companies. You can’t share everything at the beginning of a company’s life.

I’m still waiting for Linux on the desktop, Linux running on Arm computers sold by a company with both hardware and software working together as one in a user-friendly manner to the average person, you go to a store or you go online, you buy it, you take it home, you use it. On day one, within the first ten minutes of plugging it in, there really is no excuse.

After thirty-five years, of not having something workable for the average person to use, and there again, I don’t mean what is currently out there which is nothing, And no, it’s not Apple’s responsibility or Nvidia or AMD to make that happen where is that new European start-up up?

Forcing companies of any size to give free infrastructure rides isn’t the way to compete in any industry.

No. Platforms are better when the owners of them continue to invest directly in & improve the user experience. Turning them into white label runtimes for apps is something only nerds & bureaucrats with visions of grandeur dream of.

This case is about a subsidiary of them called Pricerunner, which is a price-comparison platform.

https://www.pricerunner.se

This case was about PriceRunner, a price comparison platform that was suffering from Google prioritizing its own platform in search results. Klarna just happens to be the owner.

They bought the website pricerunner.com which aggregates prices from webshops, like google shopping.

This decision is a direct consequence of the EU decision, Pricerunner applied the precedent from that case and claimed that Google discriminated against them in the same way. (https://www.delphi.se/eu-competition-blog/private-enforcemen..., https://www.domstol.se/nyheter/2026/07/google-is-to-pay-dama...)

Not like klarna are nice

IMO the fines do have an effect - Google now withholds a lot of launches from the EU, sometimes temporarily until they have time to have lawyers check them against DMA requirements, but mostly permanently. Ironically the part of Google most likely to persist in launching for the EU is Ads, since money is at stake. All the free, consumer-benefiting services are most likely to be curtailed in the face of aggressive regulation.

They do treat it as a "cost of doing business" as they do hedge between making a bigger profit through such violations vis the possible fine. But enforced fines like these serve as a warning that the government / regulator / judiciary are serious about enforcing laws and upholding rights. That precedent does discourages such actions because they know future violations will invite similar actions (the punitive fines may be worse for repeat violations) thus making the risks higher. The counter to that is political lobbying, if it is cheaper than the fines, and is also treated as another "cost of doing business".

(Even India has fined them 100s of millions of dollars - https://ssrana.in/articles/google-fined-anti-competitive-pra... ).

Absolute numbers with BigTech are never significant. Only viable paths for remedy anre outright divestment or revoking financial license in Sweden.

The former is nigh impossible, the latter is fairly trivial with sufficient will.

It is not like you typically can just ignore a court order so Google will need to convince Klarna that they have changed something or Klarna can just go back to the court.

It was about behavior 9 years ago

Internet wont be human steered by the time this is over

Just agents running x402 payments over mcp servers

Vouched, I feel similarly.

(I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted.

The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)

When you're a permitted monopoly you have the behave differently, including being fair to competitors.

1.5B is preferable to being broken up (not that Sweden could enforce that)

Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.

It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.

The thing that is illegal is leveraging a monopoly position in one market to give yourself an advantage in another market.

So Google is allowed to favour their own price comparison in, say, Hangouts, but not in Search.

Why would Swedish courts NOT favor their own national economic interests? How is that illegal?

Have you been sleeping under a rock for 30+ years, don’t know what antitrust is, and still feel confident enough to shout about it in a comment?

The law isn’t just “what you happen to intuitively think is right”, especially in a jurisdiction where you clearly do not reside.

It is illegal to use your monopoly in one area to unfairly distort the market in another. This is one of the core concepts of antitrust law.

Why would Microsoft NOT favor its own products? How is that illegal?

"Why would Microsoft NOT favor it's own browser in it's own OS? How is that illegal?"

something something monopoly. Even US has laws about this, currently not enforced though.