Discrimination of third-party services in the Yandex search engine. Violation of the competition law. Penalties. Challenging the decision.
The Federal Antimonopoly Service has filed a lawsuit against Yandex for discrimination of third-party services in the search engine, according to the Vedomosti website.
Yandex provides group services with preferential opportunities to promote services in the Yandex search engine.
The FAS is investigating possible anti-competitive methods of promoting Yandex services in search results and assessing the consequences of such practices. If violations are found, the company must pay a turnover fine.
Eliminate signs of violation of paragraph 8 of part 1 of Art. 10 of the Law "On Protection of Competition" Yandex had until April 1. The corresponding warning was sent to the Internet company on February 20, 2021.
Yandex does not agree with the accusation of restricting competition and is ready to defend its position. “Enriched search responses is a worldwide practice, all search engines give rich answers to users. Over 30,000 companies are already using our rich response technology for free. Moreover, we are already expanding the available enriched response technologies for our partners,” the company said.
According to the company's financial statements, its consolidated revenue last year increased by 25% and amounted to more than 200 billion rubles.
In the summer of 2020, Avito, ivi, CIAN, Tutu.ru, 2GIS, Profi.ru, Zoon and Drom.ru complained to the Federal Antimonopoly Service about Yandex due to interactive responses in search results. The service forced the company to stop giving advantages to its research services and gave it a month to implement the solution.
In March, 20 Russian Internet companies demanded that the search engine implement a solution. Yandex said it would take longer to implement the decision and filed a motion to postpone the deadline by one month.
Elizaveta Razina, senior lawyer at the law firm Vetrov and Partners, will comment on the situation with the violation of the law “On Protection of Competition”.
I doubt that it will come to a real fine. Although if you pay attention to current trends, the state sometimes seeks to take quite significant amounts through fines (case with Norilsk Nickel). Therefore, Yandex, of course, will not have to relax, but they definitely have their own arguments, and they are connected not only with world practice in this area, but also with the underlying algorithms that form enriched search answers, the complexity of conducting an examination in this regard. And if you do not conduct an examination, do not understand the technical aspects, then how complete and objective will the trial itself be? So not everything is so bad for Yandex itself.
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