Yandex has received a warning letter from the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) for favoring their own websites at the expense of the competitors. A one-month warning letter has been issued to Yandex in order to stop giving preference to its own websites.
In return, Yandex replies that the company is serving its users only, and the companies who have lodged the complaint themselves remove Yandex.
Recommendation:
Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS)
The Fas is basically a government agency that looks out for the antitrust laws in the country. The FAS has booked Yandex for using monopolistic practices in their search engine by giving the option of using Yandex properties only. Because of this, competitors are not able to use interactive widgets.
The Federal Antimonopoly Service issued a warning to Yandex and demanded that it stop discriminating in search results links to companies that are not part of its digital ecosystem. This is stated in the message of the department.
As the FAS established, Yandex in its search results gives an advantage to its own services.
Five sites… believe that Yandex restricts access to their services, violating competition law.
“Yandex “, according to these companies, gives priority to the related services via so-called “koldunschikov”. Such responses to user queries appear on the search results page immediately after ads and before organic results (for example, weather forecast, picture, word translation, etc.).
Services unrelated to Yandex cannot access such interactive responses, the authors of the note claim.
The main acquisition on Yandex is that the interactive widget area is only used by Yandex and other companies are not able to appear there. This practice comes under anti-trust in Russia.
But according to Yandex, they have never degraded other websites from the search engine results. Yandex further added, as a matter of fact, widget areas do not appear for all the search results. Apart from this, Yandex also pointed out to the complaining companies that even they do not give links back to Yandex services from their websites.
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