It seems clear to me that these practices leverage a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market, that is ratings and local reviews.
The actual laws are more involved, including legal theories like "tying" that I can't claim to understand (and I suspect most here can't either) but this looks no different than what Microsoft was accused of doing, which was portrayed as leveraging a desktop OS monopoly to compete in the browser market (as silly as that sounds today).
> a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market, that is ratings and local reviews.
I understand how similar it looks. However, I also note that regulators who are expert in the relevant legal topics have investigated and found no cause for action. Microsoft was not shy about providing all the detail they could to help the investigations in Europe, either.
My best guess is ratings and local reviews are also search, or 'search' isn't a market on paper the way it seems to us as consumers.
Actually, investigators in the US "settled" with Google making some minor changes to their services as concession.(And as TFA implies, these "experts" may have been influenced by Google :-) You'll note that investigations in Europe are not going nearly as well for Google.
The actual laws are more involved, including legal theories like "tying" that I can't claim to understand (and I suspect most here can't either) but this looks no different than what Microsoft was accused of doing, which was portrayed as leveraging a desktop OS monopoly to compete in the browser market (as silly as that sounds today).