BRUSSELS: Google was hit with an antitrust complaint on Monday after a Danish online job-search rival took its grievance to EU regulators, alleging the Alphabet unit had unfairly favored its own job search service.
The complaint could accelerate EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s scrutiny of the service, Google for Jobs, three years after it first came under her microscope. Since then the EU has taken no specific action relating to the online job-search sector.
The European Commission and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent out of office hours.
Google, which has been fined more than $8.4 billion (€8 billion) by Vestager in recent years for various anti-competitive practices, has previously said it made changes in Europe after complaints from online job-search rivals.
Launched in Europe in 2018, Google for Jobs triggered criticism from 23 online job-search websites in 2019. They said they had lost market share after the online search giant had allegedly used its market power to push its new service.
Google’s service links to postings aggregated from many employers, allowing candidates to filter, save and get alerts about openings, though they must go elsewhere to apply. Google places a large widget for the tool at the top of results for ordinary web searches.
Jobindex, one of the 23 critics three years ago, said Google had skewed what had been a highly competitive Danish market toward itself via anticompetitive means.
Jobindex founder and CEO Kaare Danielsen said his company had built up the largest jobs database in Denmark by the time Google for Jobs had entered the local market last year.
“Nevertheless, in the short time following the introduction of Google for Jobs in Denmark, Jobindex lost 20 percent of search traffic to Google’s inferior service,” Danielsen told Reuters.
“By putting its own inferior service at the top of results pages, Google in effect hides some of the most relevant job offerings from job seekers. Recruiters in turn may no longer reach all job seekers, unless they use Google’s job service,” he said.
“This does not just stifle competition among recruitment services but directly impairs labor markets, which are central to any economy,” Danielsen said, urging the Commission to order Google to stop the alleged anti-competitive practices, fine the company and impose periodic payments to ensure compliance.
Jobindex said it had seen examples of free-riding, with some of its own job ads copied without its permission and marketed through Google for Jobs on behalf of Jobindex’s business partners. It also cited privacy risks to job applicants and its clients.
Google hit with antitrust complaint by Danish job search rival
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Google hit with antitrust complaint by Danish job search rival
- The complaint could accelerate EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s scrutiny of Google for Jobs
Amazon’s AWS reports outage after UAE datacenter struck by ‘objects’
- AWS confirmed sparks and fire after objects hit UAE data center causing disruptions to Emirate and Bahrain regions
- Full recovery expected to “be many hours away”
LONDON: Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities in the Middle East faced power and connectivity issues on Monday after unidentified “objects” struck its data center in the United Arab Emirates.
The objects had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to two clusters of Amazon data centers in the UAE, with restoration expected to take several more hours, according to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status page.
Localized power issues impacted AWS services in both the UAE and neighboring Bahrain, according to the page. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.
While Amazon did not identify the objects, the incident happened on the same day Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A strike, if confirmed, on the AWS facility in the UAE will mark the first time a major US tech company’s data center has been knocked offline by military action. It could also raise questions around Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
US tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centers there.
“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft as well as Google and Oracle — both of which also operate facilities in the UAE — did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
AWS said a full recovery from the issues was expected to “be many hours away” for both UAE and Bahrain.
The outage had disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
