On the same day that free speech social media platform Parler sued Amazon for shutting down their website because of “political animus,” another alt-tech platform is suing another “too big to fail” tech oligarch on Monday.
Video-sharing platform Rumble filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for “unfairly rigging its search algorithms” that allowed YouTube to always be the suggested video platform in Google search results over its competitors.
According to The Wall Street Journal:
The lawsuit also argues that Google’s deals to pre-install a YouTube app on mobile devices running Google’s Android operating system have unfairly deprived Rumble of viewers[…]
Rumble’s lawsuit cites the findings of a Wall Street Journal investigation from July that found Google’s search results gave a preference to YouTube links over those from video rivals. In a series of tests, the Journal found that search results in a large majority of cases featured YouTube videos ahead of the same or very similar versions of the videos available on competitor sites.
In response, a Google spokeswoman told the Journal that they will meet this lawsuit head-on.
“We will defend ourselves against these baseless claims,” the spokeswoman said.
Big tech has been throwing their weight around censoring, deplatforming and inciting people since the storming of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C. on January 6.