A YouTube competitor, Rumble filed a lawsuit against Google alleging that the tech giant violated antitrust laws by favoring its own video-sharing platform in search results.

Rumble seeking more than than $2 billion in monetary damages from Google citing that the tech giant's monopolistic practices in the market of the video-sharing platforms continue to harm its business.

In the complaint, Rumble alleged that Google is "rigging its search algorithms purposefully and unlawfully" to generate more traffic to YouTube over other video-sharing platforms.

"By unfairly rigging its search algorithms such that YouTube is the first-listed links ‘above the fold’ on its search results page, Google, through its search engine, was able to wrongfully divert massive traffic to YouTube, depriving Rumble of the additional traffic, users, uploads, brand awareness, and the revenue it would have otherwise received,” according to the complaint. 

How Google is advancing YouTube

Toronto-based Rumble, the conservative pundits’ favorite video sharing platform, filed the antitrust suit Monday. The company argued that Google is depriving it of potential viewers and huge income.

Consequently, because of pre-installing the YouTube app by default on Android-powered smartphones, Google is giving an unfair advantage to YouTube over other competitors. 

"This also has damaged and continues to damage Rumble by further self-preferencing YouTube over Rumble (and other platforms, which harms competition in addition to Rumble)," the company added. "Because much of the online searching for videos is done on smartphones, this further ensures that Google’s YouTube platform receives unfair preferential treatment. Google thus wrongfully acquired and maintains a monopoly over the market for online video-sharing platforms."

Furthermore, the video-sharing platform accused Google of forcing the company to share its videos on YouTube in order to protect itself from bankruptcy.

Rumble claimed that Google directed revenue on 9.3 billion views to YouTube because of its unfair algorithms and "illegal tying arrangement;"

"Huge amount of revenue on 9.3 billion views that Google wrongfully directed to YouTube with its unfair YouTube-preferencing algorithms"

"If even a portion of those 9.3 billion views had occurred on Rumble’s website instead of YouTube, that would have generated well in excess of 100 million additional video uploads to the Rumble platform, which in turn would have generated billions of more views on the platform, and massive amounts of additional revenue for it and its content creators," said Rumble in the lawsuit.

Rumble, Parler, and the conservative-wing  

Rumble like Parler, is famous for welcoming right-wingers including conservative political commentator Dan Bonging, Diamond and Silk, and Fox presenter Sean Hannity. 

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski regularly shares tweets welcoming right-wing influential figures joining its platform.

🚨 Breaking 🚨

One of the leaders in the fight against big tech censorship, the great one, @marklevinshow is now on Rumble!

To subscribe to his channel, please go to https://t.co/88cIThOvY8

— Chris Pavlovski (@chrispavlovski) January 2, 2021

Rumble’s complaint followed Parler’s lawsuit against Amazon. The  microblogging company accused the e-commerce giant of of anti-competitive behavior and moving against it for political reasons.

Google, Apple and Amazon banned Parler for welcoming Pres. Donald Trump and supporters due to fears of further violence following the U.S. Capitol insurrection. Their move comes after Twitter permanently probited the president from using its platform. 

Meanwhile, Google spokesperson José Castañeda said,  “We will defend ourselves against these baseless claims" by Rumble. 

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