Yelp sues Google, alleging Google abused its dominance in general search to gain an unfair advantage in the local search and local search advertising markets
The dispute also followed Yelp’s 2017 request that the FTC revisit alleged violations involving scraped content, connecting the new case to earlier complaints about Google’s search practices. The new filing moves that continuing policy dispute into a lawsuit focused on local search and local advertising.
First-order effects
Yelp and Google enter a new legal fight over whether Google’s position in general search was used to advantage its local-search and local-ad businesses; the allegations remain to be tested in court.
The case puts Google’s handling of local results and related advertising inventory under renewed legal scrutiny, while giving Yelp a direct venue to challenge the practices it says disadvantage it.
Second-order effects
Other local-search and directory businesses gain a closely relevant test case: litigation could clarify how difficult it is to challenge a dominant general-search platform’s treatment of adjacent services.
Local advertisers may face added uncertainty around the competitive conditions of local-search advertising if the case proceeds toward discovery or potential remedies.
Third-order effects
If courts increasingly treat a dominant platform’s extension into adjacent search categories as an antitrust issue, product placement and self-preferencing decisions could become a more durable source of legal and compliance risk.
The case is another test of whether antitrust enforcement can address platform leverage across connected search and advertising markets without prescribing specific product-design choices.
The trend: This lawsuit is part of a broader shift toward testing whether control of a primary discovery platform can be leveraged into adjacent vertical services and advertising markets.
Every once in a while, Yelp should talk about why it's product is good and people should use it. Instead of all its comms being around how Google f*cked it.
For 20 years, Yelp has focused on our mission to connect consumers with great local businesses. Today, we filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google to address their anticompetitive behavior and protect consumer choice. Learn more: https://s.yelp.com/.... [image]
Yelp has sued Google in an effort to ensure a better search experience for local consumers. “Consumers lose by getting stuck in Google's walled garden of inferior quality, with multiple studies showing that people consistently prefer search results that incorporate third-party [i…
What was the anti-competitive behavior? Tweaking its algorithm in a way that hurt yelp. But Google's goal isn't to deliver traffic to websites; it's to give users answers. That may hurt Yelp...but that's not an antitrust problem. [image]
Yelp is fundamentally upset that Google decided to compete against Yelp in local search. They argue that was anti-competitive. It was pro-competitive - b/c it created more competition in local search. [image]
The arguments Yelp makes today against “self preferencing” were in the Colorado AG's own case against Google ⤵️ https://www.documentcloud.org/ ... [image]
Wow. Complaint comes out and says “Yelp is highly dependent on Google for traffic” and “Google's self-preferencing harms Yelp.” This is Yelp's problem - the law doesn't protect it from competition from Google. [image]
Yelp's GC tells @nicoagrant that there will more copycat lawsuits like this ⬇️ I'm quite sure that Judge Mehta has no intention for his ruling about G's default contracts to lead a legal tribunal for any sites who don't like their G search rankings https://www.nytimes.com/... [im…
New: For more than a decade, Yelp complained that Google tilted the search market in its favor. After Google's landmark antitrust loss, it finally decided to sue. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Good for Yelp. It's hard to imagine a more appropriate & morally righteous plaintiff in head-to-head litigation against Google. @JeremyS has been a tip of the spear in the antimonopoly movement. Godspeed. 🫡 https://www.nytimes.com/...
On the one hand, I appreciate that Yelp finally just filed its own antitrust lawsuit against Google, after spending a dozen years trying unsuccessfully to get the US govt to carry its water. OTOH, its arguments have already been rejected by federal courts and the FTC.
Today, Yelp filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. For years, Google illegally abused its monopoly in general search to dominate the local search and local search advertising markets. 1/2