Sure, but the question is, where the line will be drawn.

A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.

Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...

... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.

I personally reckon that making Google Search a significantly worse product is part of the reason why this happened. One of the companies pushing for this is Ciao, a comparison shopping service owned by Microsoft and used to provide the equivalent feature for Bing search results. Microsoft clearly know how useful these kinds of contextual results are, because before Google had them they were promoting them as Bing's big advantage over Google. Now they've managed to get the EU to restrict Google's ability to compete by offering them.

I think the line is drawn pretty clearly.

The point is not that their service was in prominent position, but it was done so that it appeared as natural result of the search.

It's somewhat like doing a search in a search engine and being shown paid results on top, without any indication that they are paid.

>The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.

From the article the issue is not that Google services appear in the search results, rather it is that they artificially make their own results appear first without regards to normal search algorithms.

"Google has abused this market dominance by giving its own comparison shopping service an illegal advantage. It gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."

The line was drawn at search results from the article. I get the slippery slope argument buy don't think it's pertinent here.

I actually read it again. Maybe I misunderstand it, but for me it is about the Google shopping comparison service: "Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service." What that means was this: "When a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results."

ow are they going to fix this now? Show five results, one of which is from Google, four from competitors? Which competitors? How bad can the results be, as long as they are returned by Google's request to their service? Can I exclude competitors? I don't want my data to go to Idealo, for example, I only have an account with Google.

I fear this is just opening a can of worms, becasue ultimately I am searching for something, go to a search engine for this, and want results. If I wanted results from a different search engine, I would have used that one. Now I get mixed results that I did not want to see. Is it really so bad that Google (the search engine) "understands" what I was probably really searching for and offers a specific type of search results - links to shops where I can buy SearchedProduct(tm)?