Yandex Search Accused of Infringing on Competitors

The IT company Yandex has been accused of violating the competition law - the largest Russian websites (private ads portal Avito, real estate search site CIAN, specialist search site Profi.ru, maps 2GIS and online cinema ivi.ru ) have combined their claims in one note. Vedomosti writes about this. Some companies are ready to appeal to the FAS, but they expect to be able to reach an agreement with the search engine.

Search witchcraft

According to the companies, Yandex gives priority in search to its own services with the help of "sorcerers". This is the name of the block of direct answers issued immediately after advertising and before organic search results. They lead the user to the service page for queries like "weather in Moscow" or "buy an apartment Moscow" and are located in the most advantageous place in the search results, providing high traffic.

Services not associated with Yandex cannot access such answers even for money, the companies claim. They all go to Yandex companies - for the search query "buy a car" the system returns "Avto.ru" and not "Avito auto", although the latter is more popular (in November 2018, Avito had 44% of the car sales market, while "Avto.ru" had only 15%). CIAN is not happy that users looking for real estate are only offered "Yandex.Real Estate", Profi.ru complains about "Yandex.Services", 2GIS - about "Yandex.Maps", Ivi.ru - about "Kinopoisk".

According to company representatives, Yandex's preferences for its "insiders" are costing competitors dearly. Thus, 2GIS CEO Alexander Sysoev said that traffic from the search engine to competing sites "on mobile devices has decreased by approximately 50%." According to estimates from a CIAN representative, the loss of traffic is about 15-20%.

The companies propose to give third-party services access to the block “on commercial terms that are the same for all market participants.”

Experts say that it is difficult to actually prove Yandex's guilt in unfair competition - the "sorcerers" promote their services in their system, replacing the usual sale of priority places in the search as advertising, which is not questioned.

Companies vs. Search

In February of this year, the FAS of Russia submitted to the government draft laws on tightening requirements for Internet services. It was proposed to recognize digital platforms as dominant at 35% "in the market of interchangeable services" and to limit the expansion of their promotion in the market. Yandex opposed and proposed its amendments, the FAS did not accept them.
Ticket operator Kassir.ru complained about Yandex to the FAS. According to company representatives, the digital platform refused to promote even on a commercial basis.
In January, Avito asked the FAS to check Avto.ru and prohibit them from copying ads from their service, but the FAS found no grounds to initiate a case.
In the case of the new claims, Yandex found it strange that commercial companies "decided to regulate the work of another commercial company." According to a Yandex representative, the "sorcerers" "do not have an advantage over organic search results and do not lead to the demotion of any sites."
Yandex itself, however, also used the power of the FAS in proceedings against competitors. In 2016, following a complaint from Yandex, the antitrust authorities acknowledged that Google had abused its dominant position in the smartphone OS market and fined the company 439 million rubles. Google paid the fine.

How are they?

In 2017, the EU Antitrust Commission imposed a record fine of 2.4 billion euros on Google for the fact that the search engine placed its own services at the top of search results.