Yelp files antitrust suit against Google over local search practices (Update: Yelp counter-response)
This lawsuit has been over 15 years coming.
JoriPress
- Yelp has filed a federal suit against Google, citing monopolistic practices in local search.
- The review site would like to see Google forced to prioritize the best results for users, even if those don’t come from Google itself.
- Yelp hopes that its efforts will see the court level the playing field for companies competing with Google.
Update: August 29, 2024 (07:43 PM ET): Yelp is unsurprisingly not super happy with Google’s response to its lawsuit. We just got a response from Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur, who attempts to highlight how the company’s case differs from earlier actions pursued against Google:
Google’s statement is misleading. Yelp’s claims have never been pursued in court, let alone thrown out. In 2023, in the government’s antitrust case, Judge Mehta ruled there was a lack of evidence that Google’s degradation of specialized vertical providers, like Yelp, had an anticompetitive effect in general search — but Yelp is not a competitor in the general search market. Yelp’s complaint explains how Google harms competition in the local search and local search advertising markets, including through self-preferencing its own lower-quality offerings and exclusive billion-dollar deals with web browsers and device makers.
