Google has been accused of leveraging its dominant market position to make searching for competing email services more difficult.
Tuta Mail, which reports having over ten million users globally, claims that since March, it has not been prominently featured in Google searches for “encrypted email.”
The company has lodged a complaint with the EU, asserting that Google, which operates the widely-used Gmail service, has undermined a competing business.
Google has refuted these allegations, maintaining that Tuta remains “easily accessible” through its search engine.
In its complaint, Tuta points out that its “ranking” — the position it holds in Google’s search results — plummeted significantly in March 2024 for queries like “secure email.”
Consequently, the company reports that monthly visits to its website pages have decreased by nearly 90%, according to the formal complaint filed with the EU.
“At the beginning of March 2024 Google suddenly stopped displaying our website for thousands of keywords,” it wrote in the complaint.
Following the change, traffic to its website only came from searches mentioning the name of its products.
“Google must stop this unfair limitation of showing our website in search results immediately,” Matthias Pfau, co-founder of Tuta Mail said.
‘Complex update’
Google’s algorithm uses a number of factors to determine the ranking of search results. When the algorithm is updated, it can have a big impact on businesses that rely on the visits search sends to their websites.
An update occurred in early March, after which Google indicated that there would be more fluctuations in rankings than usual.
However, Google denies that its updates are designed to favor any specific website, including its own.
“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 wrote.
Gmail boasts over a billion users globally. Tuta contends that “niche” email services like theirs will struggle to evolve into serious competitors if they do not show up in searches for common terms.
In a blog post the firm accused the company of breaching a new EU law that came into force in March, which designated some large firms, including Google, as “gatekeepers” subject to additional legal restrictions.
This includes not treating their own services more favourably than rivals.
“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”, the company wrote.
However, a Google spokesperson stated that Tuta appears higher than Gmail in a variety of email-related search results, including those that do not specify its brand and those mentioned in its blog.