Tuta Mail (formerly Tutanota), a German encrypted email service, filed a complaint with the DMA working group on April 23. He denounces a sudden drop in search results on Google concerning him since March 7, the date of the entry into force of the European legislative bloc.
A limitation on “branded traffic”
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“In early March 2024, Google suddenly stopped showing our website for thousands of keywords, largely limiting search traffic to just 'branded traffic,' deplores the company in its complaint. This means that people no longer found our encrypted email provider when they searched for 'encrypted email', but only when they explicitly searched for 'Tuta' or 'Tutanota'.”
At the end of March, the European Commission opened five investigations into Apple, Alphabet and Meta for non-compliance with the DMA. The European body particularly wants to know whether Alphabet favors its services in the results of the Google search engine. Pursuant to Article 6 of the DMA, third-party services must be treated fairly and non-discriminatorily compared to Alphabet services.
Google says it does not engage in unjustified promotion
“Clearly Google changed something in its search algorithms, but we don't know what it changed or why. declared to Reuters Matthias Pfau, CEO and co-founder of Tuta Mail. After removing most branded keywords, we see that our total impressions per 30-day period dropped by 88.47%. Google has taken away 90% of our online visibility.”
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For its part, Google said it did not unjustifiably promote its own products, and that the email provider was “easily accessible worldwide on the search engine”. Tuta now wants his complaint to be taken into account in European regulators' investigation into Google's compliance with the DMA. The European Commission declined to comment.
Tutanota, created in 2011 for “defending online privacy”, was rebranded as Tuta in November 2023. With over 10 million users, Tuta claims to be the second largest encrypted web messaging service in the world. A figure far behind Proton Mail, which reached the milestone of 100 million users in April 2023.
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