In a complaint filed on Monday in the US District Court of the Northern District of California, YouTube rival Rumble has sued Google for unfairly rigging search algorithms. According to the complaint, Google violated antitrust laws by altering its search algorithms to drive traffic away from Rumble towards YouTube.
Youtube Rival Rumble Sues Google For Unfairly Rigging Search Algorithms
The company said in a written complaint that the search results page always showed YouTube links above the fold, and it was able to drive massive traffic to YouTube from other competitors, including Rumble. In this way, Rumble was deprived of the additional traffic and brand awareness along with revenue it would have otherwise received.
Analytics data related to the views of rumble’s original content videos on YouTube was shown in the suit. According to the complaint, more than 9 billion views were received on rumble’s original content on YouTube. The company alleges that if even a portion of those views had occurred on Rumble’s platform instead of YouTube, it would have generated more than a hundred million additional video uploads, which would have generated millions of views on the Rumble platform. In this manner, Google was able to deprive the Rumble platform of massive amounts of additional revenue and inflow of content creators.
Apart from that, another allegation on Google is that of having an illegal arrangement with several Android-based smartphone factors to include YouTube as a pre-installed app in order to use the Android Operating System. In this manner, the YouTube platform gets preference over Rumble and other platforms in an unfair manner. This affects the competition in the market, and YouTube platforms receive preferential treatment with the help of Google’s tie up with Smartphone manufacturers. In this way, Google has been able to maintain a monopoly over the market for online video sharing platforms.
Rumble is now seeking monetary damages for more than 2 billion from Google. The company claims that they have sustained huge losses due to the unfair practices of Google.
Reacting to the allegations, Google executives said that they would defend the company against the baseless claims in the future.
Apart from Rumble, several other companies have also filed antitrust laws against Google and other big technology companies in recent months. The technology companies have an unfair advantage in the market, and most of them continue to dominate the market by having illegal arrangements with Smartphone manufacturers and other social media networks. In this way, the audience is not able to get the right access to information as the technology companies decide which news will be highlighted on a regular basis.
The technology companies are also criticized for their interference in various political activities in the recent past. Twitter recently removed the account of President Donald Trump, saying that he was using the platform to provoke his supporters to indulge in violent acts after the elections. Apart from that, the social media platform also accused the president of spreading false information with regards to the election results.
However, several social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and other companies are biased when it comes to reporting the news. They give preferential treatment to some people, and it is clearly evident in the way they censor the content according to their needs. For this reason, lawmakers in the US now want to curb the power of the Tech companies by removing the provisions of Section 230.
As of now, the big Tech companies can easily get away with regards to the content posted on their platforms by the users. Section 230 offers them protection from being sued for the content posted on their platforms. Lawmakers believe that by removing the provisions of this section, the social media companies and big tech companies will be forced to behave in a responsible way when it comes to spreading information regarding important activities in the country.