MOSCOW, April 13. /TASS/. Yandex does not agree with the charges of restricting competition and is ready to defend its position, a spokesperson with the internet company told TASS.
"We disagree with the charge of restricting competition and are ready to defend our position. Enriched search results is a global practice, all search engines provide extended responses to users. Over 30,000 companies are already using our enriched results technology for free. Moreover, we are already expanding the available enriched results technologies for our partners," the company said.
Earlier on Tuesday, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) initiated a case against Yandex after the internet company failed to comply with the requirements for search engine tools.
The regulator stated that the company continues to create discriminatory conditions in the Internet search market. The FAS also said that it was investigating possible anticompetitive practices for promoting the services of the Yandex LLC Group in search results, and will also assess the consequences such practices have led (could lead) to. If the fact of violation and restriction of competition is established, the company can be assigned a turnover fine on the amount of revenue in the market, the watchdog said.
In early April, the FAS reported that Yandex had filed a petition with the department to extend the deadline for fulfilling the requirements for search engine tools by one month.
At the end of February it became known that the FAS obliged Yandex to stop providing advantages in the search engine to its own services (including Yandex.Vertical, Yandex.Market, Yandex.Mediaservices, Kinopoisk) within one month. By doing so Yandex underestimates the position of other companies in the search results, the antitrust watchdog said.
The FAS also obliged Yandex to publish the terms of service access to search promotion tools, as well as to provide equal access to them for all market players. In case of failure to comply with the warning within the prescribed period, the FAS was to make a decision to initiate a case on violation of the antimonopoly legislation.
In response to the watchdog’s statement, Yandex said that the fulfillment of these requirements for search results tools would worsen the search quality for the user. The company noted that some of the requirements of the prescription have already been implemented in the search.
In August 2020, online services ivi, Avito, CIAN, Profi.ru, Tutu.ru, Drom.ru, 2GIS and Zoon filed a complaint to the FAS over Yandex abuse of its dominant position on the online search market. The main complaint concerned special search engine widgets, which are most often displayed above other search results and allow users to search for tickets, ads, movies and more without going to a separate page. According to the companies, only Yandex services can get there, while such a tool does not show the most suitable query result, attracting the user's attention and leading them to Yandex services, which leads to the loss of traffic from competitors.
In turn, Yandex stated that widgets are an international industry standard, they are not fixed in the first positions by default and have no advantages over regular search results.