Google faces antitrust complaint by Danish job search rival

Google has faced an antitrust complaint by Danish online job-search rival Jobindex, which addressed to the European Union (EU) its allegations that the search engine giants unfairly favoured its own job-search service.

According to a Reuters reports, the compliant could reactivate EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s scrutiny of the service, Google for Jobs, three years after the matter first came under her jurisdiction. The EU since then has not aptly acted upon the online job search sector.

Google said earlier, it made changes in Europe after complaints from online job search competitors.

“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,” Reuters quoted a Google spokesperson as saying.

Brought up in Europe in 2018, Google for jobs has generated criticism from 23 online job-search websites in 2019. They claimed that their market share has been fizzling away after Google had used its market power to propel its new services.

This case is, however, one of the several complaints that are filed against Google in the recent past.

In May, Google urged Europe’s second highest court to let go a 1.49 billion euro fine slapped by the EU antitrust regulators three years ago for deterring rivals in online search advertising.

The case is one among the three that has caused a total of €8.25 billion in European Union antitrust fines on Google.

The European commission in its 2019 verdict said that Google had abused its market dominance to halt websites using brokers other than its AdSense platform which gives search advertisements. The commission said that the illegal practice took place from 2006 to 2016.

In November last year, Google suffered a setback when the Europe’s General Court dismissed the company’s appeal and upheld the 2017 ruling and €2.42 billion fine imposed by the European Commission on the Alphabet company for breaching antitrust rules by promoting its own price comparison services at the top of search results. 

The court recognised the anti-competitive nature of Google’s practices and held that the Commission was right in penalising the company.  

“Google favors its own comparison-shopping service over competing services, rather than a better result over another result,” the court said in its verdict.