Google faces antitrust complaint by Danish job search company Jobindex

According to reports, the Danish online job search website Jobindex filed a complaint with the European Commission today against Google, saying that Google unfairly favored its own job search service “Google for Jobs”.

In 2018, Google launched Google for Jobs in Europe, which combines search with artificial intelligence (AI) to simultaneously find eligible jobs from major platforms such as LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, and Facebook.

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But in the second year of the service’s launch, 23 online job-hunting sites were criticized. They said Google used its market power to promote the new service, costing them market share. Google later said it had made adjustments in Europe following complaints from online job-seeking competitors.

Jobindex, which was also one of 23 critics three years ago, said today that Google had unfairly tilted the competitive Danish job market “to its own side”.

Jobindex founder and CEO Kaare Danielsen said that when Google for Jobs entered the Danish market last year, Jobindex had built the largest employment database in Denmark. However, within a short time after the launch of Google for Jobs in Denmark, Jobindex’s search traffic was robbed by 20% of Google’s inferior services.

” By putting its own poor service at the top of the search results page, Google is effectively hiding some of the most relevant job opportunities from job seekers, ” Danielson said. In turn, recruiters may not be able to reach all job applicants unless they Use Google’s job search service. Not only does this kill competition among recruiting services, it directly hurts the labor market, which is critical to any economy.”

To that end, Danielson urged the European Commission to order Google to stop its anti-competitive behavior, impose fines on Google, and make periodic payments to ensure compliance.

Analysts said the complaint could prompt EU antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager to speed up scrutiny of the service. Google for Jobs first caught the EU’s attention three years ago, but the EU has not taken concrete action since then.

The European Commission and Google have yet to comment. In recent years, Google has been fined more than 8 billion euros ($8.4 billion) by Vestager for various anticompetitive practices.

(via)