The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has received a complaint about the search engine Yandex. Online services ivi, Avito, CIAN, Profi.ru, Tutu.ru, Drom.ru, 2GIS and Zoon accuse the company of abuse of its dominant position.
According to the text of the document published by Kommersant on Friday, August 7, we are talking about a special Yandex widget in the search results – the “sorcerer”, which helps users to search for tickets, apartment ads and answers to other queries without going to a separate page.
According to the representatives of the companies that filed the complaint, only Yandex services are admitted to the tool, which in this way bypass the ranking rules in the search and do not display the most relevant response to the user’s review. Thus, competitors lose the attention of users and, accordingly, traffic, as a result of which the cost of promotion increases.
According to the chief analyst of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications Karen Kazaryan, in fact, Yandex is not obliged to promote third-party services for free if the link to them is not in the organic search results. However, at the same time, the FAS has something to think about, when only Yandex services appear in the “sorcerers”.
As noted, this is not the first appeal to the FAS about the “sorcerers” of the company. The sending of the current complaint was confirmed by the companies that initiated the document. The service, according to the newspaper, in turn, confirmed its receipt. The complaint will be considered in accordance with the established procedure.
On June 11, the Federal Antimonopoly Service refused Yandex to acquire taxi aggregators from the Vezet group, as the deal would have led to the dominance of companies in the taxi market.
Thus, in the course of analyzing the state of competition in the market of taxi aggregators, the service established that as a result of the transaction, the aggregate share of Yandex.Taxi and the Vezet group will increase to 70%, and in 32 subjects it may exceed 50%, and in 19 – 80 %.