by Ryan Grim
LEADING UP TO the August Republican presidential primary debate, an official from Google’s Civics and U.S. Campaigns team reached out to the Republican National Committee with a standard question, according to a cache of emails obtained by The Intercept: “[D]oes the RNC have live stream plans that I can share with the product team?”
The question made sense: For major events, people flock to Google to find out when a live event is occurring — yielding the now-legendary 2011 HuffPost article “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” — and also, just as importantly, where that event can be watched.
An RNC official told Google via email that the debate would be streaming exclusively on the upstart video platform Rumble. The August 23 debate was broadcast on Fox News and streamed on Fox Nation, which requires a subscription, while Rumble was the only one to stream it for free.
On the day of and during the debate, however, potential viewers who searched Google for “GOP debate stream” were returned links to YouTube, Fox News, and news articles about the debate, according to screen recordings of contemporaneous searches. Rumble was nowhere on the first page.
For Rumble, which is currently in discovery in an antitrust lawsuit against Google in California, this is a case of Google suppressing its competitors in favor of its own product, YouTube. “The first Republican presidential debate was yet another example of Google’s determination to squash competing video platforms,” said Rumble general counsel Michael Ellis. “In its own words, Google uses search to highlight other major election events but chose not to offer the same feature to Rumble’s livestream. We look forward to proving Google’s continued anticompetitive conduct in court.”
For Google, it was merely a miscommunication. “The facts here are very mundane,” said a Google spokesperson. “People could easily find information about where to watch the debate in Google Search results. And as part of our ongoing effort to build dedicated features in Search to more prominently showcase events like debates, we reached out to the RNC and Rumble, but unfortunately it didn’t come together in time to test and create the livestream feature. We’ve already worked with the RNC and Rumble to get this feature set up for the next debate, as we would do with any livestream provider.”
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