The platform knows perfectly well what it's doing.

Google has been trying to hide behind the "Oh dear our algorithm is experimental and fallible and sometimes it gets things wrong and that's very sad" defence, and it's obviously nonsense. You don't even need explicit evidence of collusion to understand why.

The "failure" of the algorithm has been happening for years now, and Google appears to have made no effort to correct the failure. But the real tell is that these "failures" disproportionately benefit large corporations which Google will have some relationship with - as opposed to small content creators who are disposable.

Ultimately, these actions are not mandated by law. So what's the legal - never mind moral - justification for them?