Google Sued By A Danish Job Search Network For “Favoring Its Own Service”
An antitrust complaint hit Google after a Danish job search rival took the matter to EU regulators. They have alleged the company of ‘unfairly favoring its job search service.’ This complaint can further accelerate EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s perusal of the service Google for jobs.
Its been three years since the former complaint was filed, and the EU has taken no specific action related to the online job search system.
Google jobs faced criticism in the past?
According to a Reuters report, “Google jobs” was launched in 2018 and immediately triggered criticism for 23 online job search websites in 2019. The companies blamed Google for losing market share in the job search service sector. They claimed that the online search giant had used its platform (Google Search) to push its new service and claimed it was “unfair.”
Vestager fined Google more than 8 billion euros due to anti-competitive practices. Since then, the company said it had made changes in Europe after the complaints from rival companies.
Who filed a complaint against Google?
Jobindex, a critic among those 23 companies, said that Google had narrowed down a competitive Danish market and started favoring itself via anti-competitive means. The CEO was unhappy with the Alphabet unit as the company had the most extensive jobs database network in Denmark before Google arrived.
“By putting its inferior service at the top of results pages, Google, in effect, hides some of the most relevant job offerings from job seekers. Recruiters, in turn, may no longer reach all job seekers unless they use Google’s job service,” he said.
Jobindex claimed to have observed instances of free-riding when some of its job postings were reproduced without its consent and promoted by Jobindex’s business partners through Google for Jobs. It also mentioned privacy dangers to clients and job applicants.
Google’s service works by linking to postings collected from many employers, allowing candidates to filter, save and get alerts about openings. Although, users are required to go elsewhere to apply for a vacancy.
Google places a large widget tool at the top of the first page in the Google search for filtering out information. Hence it results in lesser traffic to the websites listed below. Self-promotion is a norm for giant tech companies as they’ve always promoted their products on their platform, something John Oliver called ‘self preferencing.’
What are your thoughts about this? Do you think it’s right for Google to take advantage of being the most popular search engine in the world? Let us know in the comments section below.
