Jobindex asks the EU Commission to launch competition case against Google for abusing its dominant market position

Abuse of market power

The dominant Internet search engine Google Search currently enjoys a market share of almost 95% in Denmark. Its societal relevance is best demonstrated by the fact that since 2002, the verb “to google sth.” is included in Danish dictionaries to describe the search for information online using a search engine.

In April 2021, “Google for Jobs”, a separate job search service operated by Google, was launched on the Danish market. Since then, users, when searching for jobs in Google Search, will see the new service appear as a dedicated box at the top of Google’s search results page, above all normal search results and immediately after the paid advertisements.

“In our opinion, Google is clearly abusing its dominant market position as a general search engine by favouring its own services and collaborators,” says Kaare Danielsen, who is the founder and managing director of Jobindex. “We find that Google for Jobs raises the same competition law concerns that triggered the investigation into Google’s favouring of its comparison shopping service and for which Google already received a sentence. We therefore ask the EU Commission to raise a case against Google based on this precedent,” Danielsen says.

In November last year, the General Court of the European Union confirmed a decision of the EU Commission of 2017: Google, together with its mother company, Alphabet, was fined in excess of Euro 2.4 billion for abusing its dominant position as a search engine. The court confirmed that Google favoured its own services by ensuring them a more prominent search ranking and more attractive displaying than others on the results pages of Google Search, thereby distorting free competition at the expense of other companies and consumers in general. At the time, Commissioner for Competition Vestager emphasised that the shopping case should serve as a precedent also regarding other cases where Google treats its specialised search services more favourably within the results pages of Google Search.

Poorer search ranking and displaying for others

The Google for Jobs box appears at the top of results pages of Google Search when users enter a search query such as “job vacancies in Copenhagen”, while the regular search results or links relating to other job services, including Jobindex, appear below the search box. However, Google does not even assess whether such box indeed provides the most relevant search results in return to the user’s search query or whether there are more relevant job sites that can provide better results to jobseekers.

“We see this as a clear violation of the principle of search neutrality that Google openly proclaimed up until it became the unassailable market leader. Google’s conduct runs contrary to the purpose of a general search engine, where users expect to see neutral results that are ranked according to their objective relevance and the search behaviour of other users, not results that are determined by whether companies collaborate with Google,” Kaare Danielsen argues. “Google is extending its existing super-dominant position in the Danish market for Internet search engines to an adjacent market that others such as Jobindex have pioneered, and which was highly competitive until Google recently entered it in an unfair manner. Through the leveraging of market power by anti-competitive means and under the pretext of product innovation, Google in fact stifles innovation in the entire online job search sector, to the detriment of jobseekers and employers”, he continues.

Risk of a personal data breach and free-riding

Besides the argument that Google is abusing its dominant market position, the underlying business model for Google for Jobs indirectly poses a serious risk of breaching the provisions of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“Google for Jobs is operated by Google but the content stems from its business partners, some of which are highly recognized Danish job sites. However, among the business partners you will also find some very dubious entities,” Kaare Danielsen explains.

“Unfortunately, we regularly spot job ads on Google for Jobs that actually belong to Jobindex and our clients, yet no reference or link is made to us. Instead, people are referred to other business partners of Google for Jobs. Job applicants who have sent an application risk that some of the personal data included in their job application is compromised. For companies who have paid to appear in our job ads or in ads from other well-renowned job sites, it is completely unacceptable to find their material on sites that they have never done business with.”

Job ads are being copied without permission

Jobindex has directly witnessed how its own job ads or job ads from other companies have been copied without permission and marketed, through Google for Jobs, on behalf of its business partners.

To summarise, Kaare Danielsen says: “A company like Google should not be able to hide behind its business partners. When Google operates a service such as Google for Jobs, the company must take full responsibility for complying with the regulations and basic principles for free competition, transparency, and credibility. In situations where this does not happen, it is imperative for the relevant authorities to intervene.

Contact: Kaare Danielsen, Managing Director, Jobindex A/S, phone (+45) 2073 5010