Google is no stranger to antitrust complaints or, for that matter, antitrust suits. The company has its fair share of open cases and settled lawsuits, some coming from government entities. The latest complaint has been filed in Denmark by the Danish company Jobindex.
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Jobindex is an online job search engine that competes with Google and other job search engines. Jobindex has told the European Union, in its complaint, that Google has been favoring its job search results which puts Jobindex at a disadvantage. This latest complaint has reopened a can of worms that has been festering for three years.
The complaint could reinvigorate EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s scrutiny of the service, Google for Jobs. Three years ago, Vestager said she was looking into the issue but she has yet to take any action.
The European Commission said it would assess the complaint according to the standard procedures. Jobindex’s action comes four years after German media group Axel Springer’s jobs portal Stepstone filed a similar complaint against Google.
Google, which has been fined more than 8 billion euros ($8.4 billion) by Vestager in recent years for various anti-competitive practices, says it partners with job providers to direct people to websites with job listings relevant to them.
“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,” a Google spokesperson said.
Jobindex, one of the 23 critics three years ago, said Google had skewed what had been a highly competitive Danish market towards itself via anticompetitive means.
Reuters
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