Yelp Sues Google for Antitrust Abuse

Now that Google is an illegal search monopoly in the United States, the vultures are circling. First up is online review site Yelp, which has filed a new antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, alleging it abused its dominant market position to prevent consumers from discovering Yelp’s offerings.

“This is a case involving Google, the largest information gatekeeper in existence, which has abandoned its stated mission of providing the best information available to its consumers and instead imposed its own low-quality local search content on them,” Yelp’s filing reads. “Google’s program prevents businesses from reaching consumers without paying Google and deprives competitors of the traffic and revenue that would allow them to scale and would be a competitive constraint on Google’s operations.”

Yelp has been complaining about Google’s business practices for more than a decade, but this is the first time the company has filed a formal lawsuit. The company says Google intentionally degrades the search experience and undermines rivals to maintain its market dominance. The company also engages in behavior known as curation, Yelp says, in which Google promotes its own “inferior content” at the expense of rival content, “diminishing consumer choice.”

“Instead of competing on the merits with companies like Yelp, Google is so effective at favoring itself that an increasing number of searches result in zero clicks, meaning users never leave the Google search results page,” explains Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppleman. “And even when searches do result in a click, 30 percent of those clicks go to another Google site. In other words, Google is abusing its monopoly position in general search to keep users in the Google-owned ecosystem and prevent them from going to competing sites.”

Yelp says Google began scraping its content in 2009 after a failed bid to buy the company, and only stopped when a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into Google’s business practices “condemned” the behavior. But now that Google has been found guilty of several antitrust violations in the U.S., EU, and elsewhere, the company feels the time is right to take the next obvious step.

“The recent landmark decision in US v. Google unequivocally found that Google intentionally used unlawful means to maintain its monopoly on the general search market,” notes a statement from Yelp. “This decision is a landmark moment in antitrust law, and we view it as a strong foundation for the case that Yelp has brought against Google to address its anticompetitive conduct in the local search and local search advertising markets.”

“Yelp’s claims are not new,” Google notes in a statement, which is true. “We appeal the remaining aspects of the decision to which Yelp refers. Google will vigorously defend itself against Yelp’s meritless claims.”