Yelp has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, taking its long-standing antitrust complaints to court. Yelp filed the lawsuit, citing Google’s monopolistic behavior and anticompetitive practices in its local search services. The lawsuit comes just weeks after a federal judge in the United States deemed Google an unlawful monopoly. Yelp claims Google is hindering the growth of its competitors by unfairly promoting its own local search services.
Yelp claims that Google prioritizes its own local search services in search results, driving users to those services and stifling the growth of other competitors. Yelp describes this as “product tying,” and argues that it is an illegal practice. The company claims that these practices undermine competition and reduce the quality of local search services. Yelp is asking the court to stop Google’s anti-competitive practices and to award damages.
The ongoing antitrust battle against Google
Yelp has requested a jury trial in its lawsuit against Google and filed the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California. The same court had previously ruled in the lawsuit filed by Epic Games against Google that Google had a monopoly over the app store. It is also stated that the antitrust case won by the US Department of Justice against Google played a significant role in Yelp’s filing of this lawsuit. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman stated that the wind has changed in antitrust cases after this decision and that it is time to take action.
Yelp has previously filed complaints against Google on various platforms with similar allegations. The company filed complaints against Google in the US Senate in 2020 and filed similar claims against Google in the European Union. However, to date, these claims have not been supported by sufficient legal grounds. Yelp’s claims include that Google designs its search results pages in a way that reduces the visibility of specialized search engines like Yelp and TripAdvisor. However, these claims were previously brought up by a group of state attorneys general but were rejected by the court.
Google stated that it found Yelp’s claims to be unfounded, and reminded that such claims had previously been rejected by the judiciary, both in the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and most recently in the US Department of Justice case. In a statement from Google, it was stated that such claims by Yelp were not new and that the company would mount a strong defense against these claims.
Yelp argues that consumers are the biggest losers from Google’s practices. The company argues that by keeping users from leaving the platform, Google is hindering the growth of other vertical search services and the potential to better serve users. Yelp says this leaves Google with less incentive to improve content quality and to show less relevant but still profitable results.
Yelp, on the other hand, says that Google’s practices also hurt advertisers. The company argues that Google is able to charge more for local search ads by stifling competition, which has a negative impact on advertisers. According to Yelp, Google’s search ad revenues have increased by more than 20 percent annually over the past decade, and this has occurred despite the company gaining market share.