Problem is, Google never shut down competing sites or did anything to block them in any way. In fact they funded platforms that could be used to access them.
That's the difficulty with this sort of ruling. What, exactly, does the EU think Google did wrong here? Putting new stuff into search results? That should not be illegal and no such law exists. Reality is the EU will be perceived as both financially robbing America's tech industry and blaming it for its own failures to develop competitive services, regardless of what spin "EU citizens" try to put on this. The perception is inevitable when the supposed crime is so difficult to understand.
I've been reading them continuously for years. The EU's position on shopping sites has never made any kind of sense to me and came across strongly as a pretext. In particular, if I recall correctly, the sites that complained to the EU and started this whole process turned out to be quasi-front companies of various kinds that had never made a real attempt to compete at all.
But this is really all part of a pattern. The EU's cases and laws against tech are always based on super weak rationales. I'm long since past the point of seeing this as a simple form of extraction-ism, and I'm European and live in Europe.
That's the difficulty with this sort of ruling. What, exactly, does the EU think Google did wrong here? Putting new stuff into search results? That should not be illegal and no such law exists. Reality is the EU will be perceived as both financially robbing America's tech industry and blaming it for its own failures to develop competitive services, regardless of what spin "EU citizens" try to put on this. The perception is inevitable when the supposed crime is so difficult to understand.