Google has been accused of taking advantage of its market dominance to make it harder to search for a rival email service.
Tuta Mail – which says it has more than ten million users worldwide – alleges that, since March, it hasn’t appeared prominently in Google searches for “encrypted email.”
The company has made a complaint to the EU claiming that Google – which has its own hugely popular Gmail service – has damaged a rival business.
Google has denied the accusation, insisting Tuta remains “easily accessible” via its search engine.
In its complaint, Tuta notes that its “ranking” – how high up Google’s search results it appears – fell dramatically in March 2024 for searches such as “secure email.”
As a result, monthly visits to pages on its website have dropped by almost 90%, Tuta’s formal complaint to the EU alleges.
“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
