Less than a month after Google lost a landmark case where a federal judge ruled Google is an illegal monopolist, the crowd-sourced review company Yelp is bringing their own antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.
It's clear that the recent court loss has emboldened the longtime Google critic, as Yelp's claim states that the search company "abuses its illegal monopoly in general search to engage in anticompetitive conduct, including self-preferencing its own inferior local product, to dominate the local search and local search advertising markets," according to Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur.
He goes on, "By willfully engaging in exclusionary, anticompetitive conduct, Google has driven traffic and revenue away from competitors, made it harder for them to scale, and increased their costs, while degrading consumer choice, to grow its own market power."
In their claim, Yelp is demanding the courts order Google to halt their alleged anticompetitive behavior and to pay damages. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco today (August 28) in the same Northern District of California of California where a jury previously found Google to be an illegal monopoly via its app store late last year. That antitrust suit was filed by Epic Games in that company's ongoing battles against locked app stores from companies like Apple and Google.
Almost immediately after Google lost the federal suit, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told The New York Times that the decision "is a watershed moment. This is the time to have the conversation, this is the time to correct past wrongs."
Yelp has long been a vocal critic of Google for well over a decade, and over the years Yelp representatives have complained about Google using Yelp reviews in Google products without compensating Yelp appropriately. The company has filed complaints against Google in the EU and testified against Google in antitrust hearings in 2020.
"Yelp has long fought to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a blog post. "With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages."
You can read Yelp's full complaint here.
It should be noted that D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta narrowed the antitrust case against Google in August of last year. CNBC reported that Mehta threw out claims from state attorney generals that Google purposefully instituted search result bias against third-party narrow search companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
Google Search has been, arguably, getting worse in recent years with a focus on Google preferred results that have forced many companies into Gordian SEO knots. Perhaps this lawsuit forces Google to put work into Search that they haven't done in years.
Google provided a previous FTC investigation that concluded that "the evidence presented at this time does not support the allegation that Google’s display of its own vertical content at or near the top of its search results page was a product design change undertaken without a legitimate business justification."
Of course, that investigation concluded in 2013. Ten years is a long time for Google Search to change and shift into a potential problem or deficiency.
Not to be outdone, Yelp's own internal search results shove miles of sponsored results before providing useful answers.
If Google were to also lose this lawsuit, it could force the company to change how it indexes results from companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Though we won't see the fallout for some time.
In the case of Epic vs Google, it opens up the door for non-Google app stores on Android without restrictions, including support for storefronts with their own internal billing.
Google responds
A Google spokesperson told Tom's Guide, "Yelp’s claims are not new. Similar claims were thrown out years ago by the FTC, and recently by the judge in the DOJ’s case. On the other aspects of the decision to which Yelp refers, we are appealing. Google will vigorously defend against Yelp’s meritless claims."
They also sent a blog post from August of 2023 that outlines how Google believes how Yelp wants Search to work would "harm consumers."
