EU receives a complaint from email service about Google’s business practices
After recently receiving a fine for breaking competition laws, the EU has now had another complaint about the tech giant, Google. The company has been accused by Tuta Mail of taking advantage of its market position to stop rival services from succeeding.
Tuta Mail claims that since March, it has not been prominently featured in Google searches for “encrypted email.” The company has filed a complaint with the EU, alleging that Google, with its widely used Gmail service, has harmed a competitor.
According to the complaint, Tuta’s ranking on Google’s search results dropped in March 2024 for queries like “secure email.” Consequently, monthly visits to its website pages have plummeted by nearly 90%, as stated in Tuta’s formal complaint to the EU. After the alteration, website traffic solely originates from searches mentioning its product names.
The company wrote in its complaint: “At the beginning of March 2024 Google suddenly stopped displaying our website for thousands of keywords. Google must stop this unfair limitation of showing our website in search results immediately.”
Google has denied the allegations, saying that it uses several factors to determine the ranking of search results. It added that Tuta is still easily accessible on the search engine. The company noted that, due to recent updates, there could be more fluctuations than normal in search rankings, but it denies that this is to intentionally favour particular websites.
In a statement, Google said: “Search ranking updates absolutely do not aim to preference Google products, or any other particular website.
The email provider in question is easily accessible globally on Search. Google in its role as a gatekeeper is impacting the profits and marketability of our private email service Tuta Mail – a direct competitor to Google’s Gmail, which goes against the Digital Markets Act.”
Tuta says that Google is currently in breach of the EU’s new laws, which are intended to make it harder for big tech companies to dominate the market at the expense of small businesses.
