The EU are verging on gangsterism, extorting businesses for increasingly specious violations and terms. Of course Google favour their affiliates on THEIR web services, their property.
I've got to assume you're aware of things like unfair competition, antitrust laws, market distortions and so on. The idea is that a disproportionately influential market participant can cause the market to become less free by virtue of inhibiting competition – competition being a vital part of a free market.
Rules against abusing a dominant market position are there specifically to try and prevent abuse from happening.
I could understand the reasonableness of arguing about the specifics of Google's market dominance or the degree to which this activity was a problem. But "increasingly specious violations and terms" and "absolutely sickening" seem to suggest you haven't really considered the validity of such rules.
Promoting your own services in general is fine. But when a huge, huge majority of the market uses your service for discovery, your decision to promote your own services over competitors' damages competition in the market — users end up with less choice in practice, even though they could theoretically switch to another service.
Those rules exist to try and prevent this sort of abuse happening.
If they had competed and won this share fairly, they wouldn't get a fine.
Remember that EU, during these years was consistently the largest, or the second largest, depending on year, economy of the world, so this 80% is huge and justifies the size of the fine.
There's nothing wrong with Google having a huge market share. But when that market share is used to essentially hide knowledge about competitors, isn't it obvious that the market becomes less free?
Yes, you did. And now you have the de-facto monopoly over the key for the front door. So, what could be wrong with asking for half their life savings if they want to be let out?
And at least the EU commission seems to have come to the conclusion that Google has used its power that it got due to its successful search engine to promote their price comparison site more than it did competing sites, and that not solely based on merits of the site itself.
Whether people could potentially evade the manipulation if they cared enough is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant whether a fraud victim could have figured out they were being defrauded if they had cared enough.
Google fans would like to make this about US vs. the EU, because it misdirects away from Google's illegal actions. But multiple US companies asked for and supported this investigation against Google. And I wish our government laid down the same charges against them here.
Is this just a case of lobbying corruption?
The FTC's staff have previously recommended filing charges against Google, and then the people up the ladder buried it.
Most users don't.