Yelp, a longtime Google rival, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, accusing it of anti-competitive practices in the local search market.
The Verge Reports Yelp, Google's most vocal rival, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the search engine giant. The move comes less than a month after a federal court ruled that Google violated antitrust laws and maintained an illegal monopoly. Yelp's lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, alleges that Google established or maintained a monopoly in local search services by favoring its inferior vertical market over its competitors, thereby stifling competition and reducing the quality of local search services.
Yelp says Google's practice of directing users from general search engine result pages to its local search vertical illegally ties together separate products and prevents rivals from scaling. It wants the court to order Google to stop its anticompetitive practices and pay damages. Yelp is demanding a jury trial, which will be heard in the same court that found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly through its app store in a separate lawsuit against Epic Games.
Yelp's decision to take legal action against Google was bolstered by the Department of Justice's recent victory in an antitrust case focused on Google's exclusionary practices surrounding the distribution of search services. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said: The New York Times The shifting climate in antitrust law following the Department of Justice's victory was a major factor in the company's decision to file suit.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in favor of the government in the lawsuit against Google, but had previously narrowed the scope of the suit by dismissing a group of state attorneys general that had alleged that Google had engaged in unfair practice by designing its search results pages to reduce the visibility of specialty search engines like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
In response to the lawsuit, Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said: “Yelp's claims are not new. Similar claims were dismissed by the FTC several years ago and more recently by the judge in the DOJ case. We are appealing the other aspects of the decision that Yelp mentions. Google will vigorously defend against Yelp's meritless claims.”
Yelp argues that it's consumers who ultimately suffer as a result of Google's anti-competitive behavior. In a blog post, Stoppelman wrote: “By trapping users on Google, other vertical search services are unable to acquire customers, scale, or build useful content. A less competitive environment gives Google less incentive to invest in quality content that improves the consumer experience and more incentive to show less relevant but monetizable results.”
The lawsuit also alleges that stifling competition in local search has harmed advertisers by driving more local advertisers to Google. Stoppelman noted that “for most of the past decade, Google has grown its search advertising revenue by more than 20 percent year over year and has expanded its market share.”
Yelp has long raised antitrust concerns about Google. The company has previously testified about its complaints before the Senate, filed complaints with the European Union about Google's alleged self-preferential practices and helped government agencies bring charges against the search giant.
Learn more The Verge is here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
