The Court Denies Satan Soldier A.K.A Google’s Request to Dismiss Rumble’s Antitrust Lawsuit, Ensuring Further Discovery

HNewsWire: Video platform Rumble has filed a lawsuit against Google alleging that the tech giant is “unfairly rigging its search algorithm” in favor of YouTube videos in its search results.

Rumble filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in California alleging that Google is “unfairly rigging its search algorithms” to place YouTube above Rumble in its search results, according to a report by Wall Street Journal.

Rumble has become an alternative to YouTube for many conservative pundits, especially in the wake of big tech companies banning President Donald Trump, which resulted in a social media exodus among conservatives from their platforms.

“Google, through its search engine, was able to wrongfully divert massive traffic to YouTube, depriving Rumble of the additional traffic, users, uploads, brand awareness and revenue it would have otherwise received,” reads the lawsuit.

In its lawsuit, Rumble adds that it conducted a test and discovered that a Google search specifically for “funny dogs on rumble” returned a list of YouTube videos.

An unusual and significant court ruling entitles YouTube's main competitor, Rumble, to obtain long-hidden internal documents on Google's search engine manipulations.

On Friday, a federal district judge in California refused Google's plea to dismiss a case claiming that the Silicon Valley behemoth violates federal antitrust laws by blocking fair competition for its YouTube video platform.

Rumble, YouTube's free speech rival, filed the case against the search engine behemoth, which has controlled YouTube since its $1.65 billion acquisition in 2006. Its central claim is that Google's use of its monopolistic stranglehold on search engines to destroy all competitors to its various other platforms violates the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which prohibits "monopolizing, or attempting to monopolize...any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations."

It is unusual for antitrust actions filed against the four Big Tech corporate behemoths (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon) to be dismissed early. The decision against Google ensures that the case now moves to the discovery stage, where Rumble will have the right to obtain from Google a wide range of information about its practices, including internal documents on Google's algorithmic manipulation of its search engine and the onerous requirements it imposes on companies reliant on its infrastructure to all but force customers to use YouTube.

Rumble, which was founded in 2013, had tremendous growth in the run-up to the 2020 election. As the election neared, Americans faced rising and aggressive Big Tech censoring of political information.

Conservative politicians, followed by a broad variety of heterodox voices on the right and left, started flocking by the millions to Rumble, which promised and so granted significantly more permissive free speech rights. At the time, Google and other Big Tech platforms were aggressively escalating their censoring of political video material on YouTube on the basis of "disinformation" and "hate speech," at the insistence of the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Rumble's spectacular user growth in 2020 has continued to accelerate, as Big Tech in general, and Google in particular, clamped down harder on dissident ideas in the name of the COVID epidemic, and even especially more so in relation to the US/NATO participation in the conflict in Ukraine. As Google's campaign on free expression continues, an increasing number of major politicians, journalists, and pundits, as well as smaller video producers, have either been banned by YouTube or left on their own to join Rumble.

The opportunity to talk more freely on Rumble on the most heated political disputes has become one of the primary causes of the departure of people from YouTube to Rumble, both those with significant public platforms and regular individuals alike.