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- The Canadian video-sharing platform Rumble is suing Google for claiming that the tech giant “unfairly fakes its search algorithm” to prefer YouTube videos in its search results.
- Rumble is a direct rival to YouTube that has become popular with conservative American figures who claim to be censored by established tech platforms.
- The lawsuit says Google and other big tech players could face antitrust headaches from smaller, conservative-friendly rivals.
- Rumble’s lawsuit accuses the tech giant of “willfully and illegally creating and maintaining a monopoly on the market for online video sharing platforms.”
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
Video-sharing site Rumble has accused Google of “unfairly rigging its search algorithm” to favor YouTube videos in search results, marking the latest in a string of antitrust headaches from the tech giant.
Rumble, based in Toronto, filed a lawsuit in California on Monday, claiming that Google unfairly cost it viewers and advertising revenue due to its search algorithms and the pre-installation of the YouTube app on Android devices.
“Google, thanks to its search engine, was able to wrongly divert massive traffic to YouTube, depriving Rumble of the additional traffic, users, downloads, brand awareness and revenue it would have otherwise received,” indicates the complaint.
Google has faced a slew of antitrust lawsuits due to its dominance in search in recent years, drawing the attention of US authorities, EU lawmakers and market competitors.
Rumble has grown in popularity with conservatives over the past year, encouraged by Republican Devin Nunes and others. The company claims to have over 2 million creators using the site.
Right-wing influencers in the US have taken an aggressive stance against established US tech companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, a stance recently escalated by platforms teaming up to essentially block the platform. Talking Right Social Messaging.
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 joining the platform.
In its complaint, Rumble alleges that Google “has deliberately and illegally created and maintained a monopoly on the market for online video sharing platforms in at least two ways.”
“Firstly,” he added, “by manipulating the algorithms by which video search results are listed, Google ensures that videos on YouTube are listed first and that of its competitors … are listed. at the bottom of the list …
Second, by preinstalling the YouTube app as the default online video sharing app on Google smartphones, and entering into illegal and anti-competitive tied sales agreements with other smartphone makers to do the same. . “
The company said it was seeking at least $ 2 billion in damages.
Rumble’s complaint comes shortly after Parler sued Amazon.
Amazon had hosted the Talk service on its cloud service, AWS, but started the business after the U.S. Capitol riot last week. Parler argued in its subsequent lawsuit that Amazon was behaving in an anti-competitive manner. Parler’s lawsuit says sites and apps banned or penalized by US tech giants for violent speech are ready to use 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 further comment from Business Insider.
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