> The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are.
Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users.
[1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.
Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users.
[1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.