Rumble’s antitrust lawsuit against Google moves to first stage
In early 2021, Rumble, the video streaming platform, filed a lawsuit against Google in federal court in California. Rumble’s lawyers have alleged that the tech giant is unlawfully altering search results to benefit YouTube, its sister company. They added that Google is unfairly rigging its search algorithms, which directly impacts Rumble.
The latter requested more than 6 billion dollars in damages. This sum corresponds to three times the losses recorded by the streaming platform. Google counterattacked by asking the court to dismiss Rumble’s lawsuit against it. However, Haywood Gilliam, a California judge, said Rumble could proceed with the first steps of an antitrust lawsuit against Google.
Lawsuit moves to discovery stage
Rumble also takes aim at Google’s agreements with Android device makers that generally agree to pre-install bundles of Google apps as well as limit pre-installs of non-Google apps. The streaming platform argues that these deals are being done in a manner deemed illegal by antitrust watchdogs. That’s not all, Rumble’s lawyers allege that Google unfairly loads top video search results with YouTube links, burying Rumble’s results.
And now that Haywood Gilliam has decided to move the lawsuit to the discovery stage, Rumble has the right to obtain from Google a host of information about its practices. He can even request internal documents from Google about the algorithmic manipulation of its search engine and the onerous requirements it demands from companies dependent on its infrastructure.
Google has alleged that it did not commit any violation of antitrust law
In counterattacking, Google argued that Rumble’s content ranks as high as it deserves. By the way, even Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo Search and DuckDuckGo search engines show results similar to Google’s. These rival search engines also rank YouTube videos higher than Rumble.
Google maintains that it tries to return search results that are most likely to satisfy users, whether or not those results include content found on the YouTube service. Even Google’s arguments don’t seem to have convinced the judge the case may yet be thrown out before it reaches trial.
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