Tech giant Google faces burns from the video-sharing site Rumble of "unfairly rigging its search algorithm" to favour YouTube's videos in search results, marking the tech giant's latest in a series of antitrust headaches.
Rumble, based in Toronto, filed a lawsuit in California on Monday claiming that Google had unfairly cost it viewers and advertising revenue because of its search algorithms and pre installation of the YouTube app on Android devices."Google, through its search engine, was able to wrongfully divert massive traffic to YouTube, depriving Rumble of the additional traffic, users, uploads, brand awareness and revenue it would have otherwise received," the complaint said.
Google has faced a string of antitrust actions over its search dominance the past few years, drawing attention from US authorities, European Union legislators, and market competitors alike.
Rumble has become popular with conservatives in the past year or so, encouraged by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes and others. The company says it has more than 2 million creators using the site. Rumble's complaint comes shortly after Parler sued Amazon.
Amazon had hosted Parler's service on its cloud service, AWS, but booted the firm off after the US Capitol riot last week. Parler argued in its subsequent suit that Amazon was behaving anti competitively. Parler's lawsuit indicates that sites and apps banned or penalized by the US tech giants over violent speech are willing to use the emerging antitrust sentiment in court.
A Google representative told the press: "We will defend ourselves against these baseless claims."
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