Google to EU: our vertical search products fail in the market, but are useful enough for our users to display
Mike Masnick / Techdirt :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 Techdirt piece captures Google's core defense in the original EU antitrust fight: its vertical search products don't make money, so it displays them because they help users, not to squeeze rivals. That framing set up a decade-long tug-of-war with Brussels over how Google presents its own services next to competitors.
The arc since then runs through an EU case under the DMA targeting how Google displays rival product results, a study finding Google's shopping search still sent less than 1% of traffic to rival services years after the earlier crackdown, and now reports that Google plans to test showing competing vertical search services alongside its own in Europe.
First-order effects
- Google's argument directly shapes what EU regulators can justify fining: if the products are commercial failures, the case becomes about presentation and user benefit rather than monopoly rents.
- EU rival vertical search services are the named beneficiaries at stake — the entire dispute is over whether they get visibility inside Google's results pages.
Second-order effects
- Remedy design becomes the battleground: when Europe forced changes after the earlier crackdown, a study found rivals still received under 1% of shopping-search traffic, so any new display format will be judged on real click-through rather than mere presence.
- Choice-based fixes tend to reward whoever can bid for placement — as when DuckDuckGo failed to win Google's Q4 auction for Android's default search choice screen in large EU countries.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, European regulation moves from punishing conduct to prescribing result-page layout itself, with Google's own reported plan to test rival vertical results next to its own as the template regulators push toward.
The trend: A decade on from Google telling the EU its vertical products fail commercially, Europe is shifting from antitrust fines toward mandating that Google's results pages carry competing services.