Video platform Rumble loses antitrust tumble with Google

(CN) — A federal judge sided with Google in an antitrust dispute filed by the online video platform Rumble, finding Wednesday that the lawsuit came after the four-year statute of limitations had run out.

Founded in 2013, Rumble has become the preferred alternative to YouTube for conservatives and far-right figures, with 67 million monthly users. It has streamed Republican presidential debates, and the company’s cloud services host the Donald Trump-founded social media platform Truth Social. The company sued Google in January 2021, claiming the tech giant maintained an illegal monopoly by virtue of its ownership of YouTube, the video platform with more than 2.5 billion monthly users.

Rumble claimed Google directed its search users to YouTube, rather than other platforms, like Rumble — even when the search queries had ‘Rumble’ in them. Rumble said it has lost billions of video views on its platform since 2014.

“It is Google’s unlawfully acquired monopoly power in the relevant market that has allowed it to pay so little and keep so much of the advertising revenue,” Rumble said in its complaint.

The platform had claimed the antitrust violations began in 2014. While the statute of limitations for such claims is four years. Rumble had argued that its complaint was exempt from the statute of limitations since Google had concealed its illegal activity by publicly claiming “that its search results were intended to provide the most responsive, relevant, and high-quality results.”

But U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam disagreed, writing Wednesday that Google’s statements to that effect were “too general to reasonably constitute an affirmative act of denying wrongdoing.” He found Rumble had failed to properly plead fraudulent concealment and had “failed to identify evidence on which a reasonable jury could rely to find that defendant affirmatively misled it regarding the alleged self-preferencing or allegedly exclusionary contracts, such that it was reasonably delayed in bringing an antitrust suit based on either theory.”

Rumble had also argued that Google’s antitrust activity was continuous, and therefore exempt from the statute of limitations. Haywood dismissed this argument, pointing out that Rumble’s lawyers had given it little more than “one cursory sentence” in their motion briefings.

“Plaintiff does not identify any specific facts that flesh out this general assertion in any detail, and does not identify any evidence in the record to support it,” Gilliam wrote.

Rumble “failed to identify any evidence on which a reasonable jury could rely to find that an exception to the statute of limitations applies.”

The ruling ends the case, though Rumble can still file an appeal.

Rumble also sued Google over its online advertising service, which it also says is a violation of the Sherman antitrust act.

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