Google was knee deep in the news this week as the European Union leveled a $5.1 billion dollar fine against them. That fine had to do with the E.U. claiming Google’s handling of its Android OS gives it an unfair advantage. Now, the search engine DuckDuckGo is accusing Google of anti-competitive search behavior. This isn’t the first time DuckDuckGo has called Google out. But given the big fine the E.U. dished out, it seems DuckDuckGo saw an open door to bring the issue up again.
Their anti-competitive search behavior isn’t limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they’d like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 18, 2018
The company is happy about the E.U. decision to fine Google and gave some examples of Google’s anti-competitive search behavior, including the fact that Google purchased the duck.com domain name. The company feels Google did this intentionally to confuse users and redirects duck.com to Google.
We welcome the EU cracking down on Google’s anti-competitive search behavior. We have felt its effects first hand for many years and has led directly to us having less market share on Android vs iOS and in general mobile vs desktop. A couple examples…https://t.co/0NGtouiqA2
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 18, 2018
While from DuckDuckGo’s complaints seem legit from their standpoint, Google isn’t the only company that does this. Windows 10 users using Chrome often get prompts while browsing to switch to Microsoft Edge which is included as the default browser on Windows 10. Of course, Windows 10 isn’t free like Google Search is, so there’s that component as well. Still, it’s definitely not a practice limited to one tech company trying to drive more people to use their products instead of a competing product.
What do you think of these allegations? Which search engine do you use? If you use DuckDuckGo have you seen these “switch search provider” prompts? Have you ever considered DuckDuckGo? Or are you team Google all the way? Let us know in the comments below or on GooglePlus, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust-eu-duckduckgo-chrome” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: The Verge[/button]