Genius Media Group Inc. depends on Google’s search engine to send music lovers to its website stocked with hard-to-decipher lyrics to hip-hop songs and other pop hits.
Now Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site.
Google denies doing anything nefarious. Still, Genius’s complaints offer a window into the challenges small tech companies can face when the unit of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.43% GOOG, -0.31% starts offering competing services on its platform.
The complaints come amid mounting concerns over the business practices of Google and other tech giants. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Department of Justice is gearing up for a new antitrust probe into the search company.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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