- Canadian video-sharing platform Rumble is suing Google for alleging that the technology giant is “unfairly manipulating its search algorithm” to give preference to YouTube videos in its search results.
- Rumble is a direct rival to YouTube, which has become popular with conservative U.S. figures who say they are being censored by established technology platforms.
- The lawsuit indicates that Google and other major technology companies may face antitrust headaches from smaller, more conservative rivals.
- The Rumble lawsuit accuses the tech giant of “intentionally and illegally creating and maintaining a monopoly in the online video sharing platform market.”
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Video-sharing site Rumble accused Google of “unfairly manipulating its search algorithm” to favor YouTube videos in search results, marking the latter in a series of tech giant antitrust headaches.
Toronto-based Rumble filed a lawsuit in California on Monday, claiming that Google had unfairly cost viewers and advertising revenue because of its search algorithms and pre-installing the YouTube app on Android devices.
“Google, through its search engine, was able to unduly divert large traffic to YouTube, depriving Rumble of additional traffic, users, uploads, brand awareness and revenue that it would have otherwise received,” said the complaint.
Google has faced a number of antitrust claims over its search dominance in recent years, attracting the attention of United States authorities, European Union lawmakers and market competitors.
Rumble became popular with conservatives last year or so, encouraged by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes and others. The company claims to have more than 2 million creators using the site.
Influential rights in the U.S. have taken an aggressive stance against established American tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, a position recently intensified by platforms that have come together to essentially block the social messaging platform Parler.
Currently, Rumble’s list of most watched videos includes conservative political commentator Dan Bongino, Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative YouTubers Diamond and Silk. Its CEO, Chris Pavlovski, regularly posts updates on Twitter about right-wing figures who have joined the platform.
In his complaint, Rumble claims that Google “intentionally and illegally created and maintained a monopoly in the online video sharing platform market in at least two ways.”
“First,” he added, “by manipulating the algorithms by which video search results are listed, Google ensures that videos on YouTube are listed first, and those of its competitors … are listed below in the list. .
“Second, by pre-installing the YouTube app as the standard online video sharing app on Google smartphones and entering into anti-competitive and illegal agreements with other smartphone manufacturers to do the same.”
The company indicated that it was seeking compensation of at least $ 2 billion.
Rumble’s complaint comes shortly after Parler sued Amazon.
Amazon hosted Parler’s service on its cloud service, AWS, but dismissed the company after the US Capitol riot last week. Parler argued in his subsequent action that Amazon was behaving in an anti-competitive manner. Parler’s lawsuit indicates that sites and apps banned or penalized by U.S. tech giants for violent speech are willing to use the emerging antitrust sentiment in court.
A Google representative told The Wall Street Journal: “We will defend ourselves against these baseless claims.”
Rumble and Google did not immediately respond to requests for additional comments from Business Insider.
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