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Last April, the European Union announced it would investigate Google for alleged anticompetitive actions and abuse of power. The search giant and Android developer fired back today, in a legal response of more than one hundred pages. While that report is confidential, Ken Walker, Google’s general council and a senior vice-president, has written a blog post detailing how Google sees the situation and what the company thinks of the EU’s charges.

Google’s response makes it clear that the company believes the EU is wrong on all counts. It argues that its own research and data shows that paid display of ads from specific merchants does not harm other services listed on Google. It claims to have data “to rebut claims that our ad displays and specialized organic results harmed competition by preventing shopping aggregators from reaching consumers.” And it argues that the EU has failed to consider the impact of Amazon and eBay as competitors for Google itself.

The Google Shopping Unit is one feature other companies are unhappy about.

One thing Walker doesn’t touch on, however, is that anti-trust law is very different in the EU compared with the United States. In the US, to prove that a monopoly is illegal, you have to provide evidence of consumer harm. This restriction doesn’t exist in the European Union; an abuse of monopolistic power can be found to exist if one company takes actions that harm a competitor unjustly, even if there is no direct evidence that consumers were themselves harmed. Some would argue that this represents an unfair restriction on business, while others feel it’s actually a way of safeguarding consumer preference and choice by ensuring that smaller companies don’t face unfair competition.

Either way, Walker appears to somewhat contradict himself. First, he states that Google’s EU results do not harm competition by changing results. Then, later, he writes: “Moreover, the ways people search for, compare, and buy products are rapidly evolving. Users on desktop and mobile devices often want to go straight to trusted merchants who have established an online presence.”

I’m not sure you can have this both ways. You can argue Google’s results don’t impact other aggregators, or you can argue Google provides a service people want by pairing them immediately with a trusted party. This sounds like Google wanting to eat its cake and have it too. The meat of this case is over whether Google unfairly prioritizes its own services and links. Multiple firms have joined in calling for an investigation of Google’s actions, with participants ranging from Microsoft (for obvious reasons) to organizations like Getty Images. The specifics of each complaint vary, but the general theme is the same.

Google defends these actions as necessary. Walker writes: “In providing results for people interested in shopping, we knew we needed to go beyond the old-fashioned ’10 blue links’ model to keep up with our competitors and better serve our users and advertisers. We developed new ways to organize and rank product information and to present it to users in useful formats in search and ads. In 2012, as part of that effort, in addition to our traditional ads, we introduced the Google Shopping Unit as a new ad format.”

Google, essentially, is arguing that operating its own shopping comparison price tool is a simple response to how consumers behave. The EU is arguing that by setting up its own comparison tools, Google has moved from providing search results to influencing them to better serve its own financial ends and to confer an unfair advantage on certain companies it works with. The EU has the authority to fine Google up to $6.7 billion for these actions but almost certainly wouldn’t. The $1.45 billion case against Intel was the largest fine ever levied in the European Union’s history.

The EU has announced that it is also looking into Android, but today’s blog post did not address any of the concerns around that operating system.