Google has faced sanctions from the European Union and the United Kingdom in recent months.
Search engine giant Google was hit with an antitrust complaint on Monday. This latest development comes after the company’s Danish online job-search rival Jobindex took its complaints to the European Union regulators.
According to Jobindex, Google had unfairly favoured its own job search service ahead of the others.
The European Commission revealed earlier today that it would look into the complaint as per the standard procedures. This isn’t the first time Google is facing such a complaint.
Four years ago, German media group Axel Springer’s jobs portal Stepstone filed a similar complaint against the US-based search engine giant.
Google has paid more than 8 billion euros ($8.4 billion) in fines to the European Commission in recent years for violating various competitive practices. The company said it is working with job providers to direct job seekers to websites with job listings relevant to them.
The company’s spokesperson said;
“Any jobs provider, big or small, is able to take part, and companies are seeing increased traffic and job matches as a result of this feature.”
Jobindex accused Google of skewing what was previously a very competitive Danish market using its anti-competitive tools. The company’s founder and CEO, Kaare Danielsen, said Jobindex had the largest jobs database in Denmark before Google for jobs entered the local market in 2021. He said;
“Nevertheless, in the short time following the introduction of Google for Jobs in Denmark, Jobindex lost 20% of search traffic to Google’s inferior service. By putting its own 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 added that Google’s practices stifle competition amongst recruitment services and also impair the labor markets.
Last month, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), UK’s competition regulator, opened a fresh investigation into Google. The investigation focuses on Google’s role in the advertising technology market.
