Yelp Sued Google The company on Wednesday accused the company of violating antitrust laws by abusing its monopoly in search to gain an advantage in local search services and advertising.
They claim that Google is taking traffic away from competitors such as Yelp and directing it to its own “inferior” local search product.
“This is an example of Google, the largest information gatekeeper in existence, abandoning its professed mission of providing the best information to consumers and instead forcing its own low-quality local search content on them.” The application states:.
Yelp claims that Google's practices have caused “stagnation or decline in traffic” to it and other competitors, reducing advertising revenue and increasing costs, despite the fact that Yelp offers an “objectively superior service.”
“For years, Google has used its monopoly in general search to advance its own profits at the expense of what's best for consumers, innovation and fair competition,” Yelp general counsel Aaron Schur said in a statement.
“Google has knowingly engaged in exclusionary and anti-competitive behavior to steal traffic and revenue from its competitors, make it harder for them to scale, increase their costs, and reduce consumer choice while expanding its market power,” he continued.
Yelp's lawsuit was filed just weeks after a federal court ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly on online search and text advertising.
The landmark antitrust ruling found that the tech giant's exclusivity deals with partners such as Apple and established Google as the default search engine on its devices prevented rivals from gaining the scale they needed to effectively compete.
“Judge Amit Mehta's recent decision in the government's antitrust lawsuit against Google, finding that Google has unlawfully maintained a monopoly in general search, is a landmark decision in antitrust law and provides a strong basis for Yelp's lawsuit against Google,” Schur added.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the Yelp lawsuit was “not new.”
“Similar allegations were made several years ago [Federal Trade Commission]and more recently by Judge [Department of Justice’s] “We will appeal the other aspects of the ruling that Yelp mentions, and Google robustly refutes Yelp's baseless claims,” the spokesperson said.
