Google is already facing mounting legal challenges from regulators globally who accuse the tech giant of maintaining an illegal monopoly over its search and digital advertising businesses.
But now one of its most prominent rivals is alleging that the titan is abusing browser extensions to favor its products and stifle competitors, adding a new wrinkle to the high-stakes antitrust debate and momentum to calls for new regulation.
DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg, whose company offers a competing search engine that touts its privacy protections, told myself and Gerrit De Vynck during an interview Tuesday that Google is deploying manipulative design features, known as “dark patterns,” to trick users into abandoning rival products.
According to DuckDuckGo, Google for years has used misleading notifications to lure users into disabling its rival’s browser extensions and to discourage them from switching their default search engines on its web browser, Chrome. But Weinberg said Google in August 2020 tweaked the prompts to more blatantly nudge users away from jumping ship.
The changes include requiring users to answer whether they would rather “Change back to Google search” after adding the DuckDuckGo extension and showing users a larger, highlighted button when giving them the option to “Change it back” or not.
Weinberg said the tweaks — although subtle — have had a major impact.
Since Google implemented the changes, DuckDuckGo said it has seen a significant drop — 10 percent — in how many new users it has been able to retain on its services on Chrome. DuckDuckGo said that has translated to hundreds of thousands of new users lost. (Chrome is the world’s most prevalent desktop browser by a wide margin.)
It’s the first time the company is publicly speaking out about how the practice has impacted its business, including what it says are millions in potential lost revenue since Google changed its prompts in 2020.
“For search engines like us that are trying to actively allow consumers to switch, [or] choose an alternative, they’re making it unreasonably complicated to do so and confusing consumers,” Weinberg said of Google.
Read More: Google Hammering Competitors By Manipulating Browser Extensions