I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.
And this is the basis of an unfair competition case?
On what basis then should or shouldn't Google deprioritize rankings? If a website offers products for $1 and hides a $99 shipping fee, should they still appear in the search results?
It is anti-competitive to kill the competition before you product launch, if you they have active plans to be in the market or already under product development during the same time .
Clearly Google was unable to show that it wasn't the case, the onus is on them to show that they didn't even think they would ever get into this space. It would be ridiculous proposition to prove for them given that information discovery and aggregation has always been core to their search business, any competent product manager was thinking about it 5 years before at-least.
It is not like they killed competition say in mobile OS space in 2005 and then decided to buy Android couple of years laters to build a competitor to Apple and got sued for that, Search and aggregation of other sites is the foundation of their business .
> I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.
The first iteration of comparison shopping on Google, then called Froogle, had launched several years prior to their site.
> Created by Craig Nevill-Manning and launched in December 2002, Froogle was different from most other price comparison services in that it used Google's web crawler to index product data from the websites of vendors instead of using paid submissions.
And this is the basis of an unfair competition case?
On what basis then should or shouldn't Google deprioritize rankings? If a website offers products for $1 and hides a $99 shipping fee, should they still appear in the search results?