Yelp Sues Google For Allegedly Using Monopoly To Gain Unfair Advantage In Local Search

Yelp has officially filed a lawsuit towards Google for allegedly utilizing its monopolistic powers to provide Google an unfair benefit in native search and native search adverts. “For years, Google has leveraged its monopoly generally search to pad its personal backside line on the expense of what’s greatest for shoppers, innovation, and honest competitors,” Yelp’s Basic Counsel, Aaron Schur stated.

Aaron Shur informed us:

Yelp’s antitrust lawsuit towards Google addresses how Google abuses its unlawful monopoly generally search to interact in anticompetitive conduct, together with self-preferencing its personal inferior native product, to dominate the native search and native search promoting markets. For years, Google has leveraged its monopoly generally search to pad its personal backside line on the expense of what’s greatest for shoppers, innovation, and honest competitors. By willfully participating in exclusionary, anticompetitive conduct, Google has pushed visitors and income away from opponents, made it tougher for them to scale, and elevated their prices, whereas degrading shopper selection, to develop its personal market energy.

Choose Amit Mehta’s current ruling within the authorities’s antitrust case towards Google, discovering Google illegally maintained its monopoly generally search, is a watershed second in antitrust legislation, and offers a robust basis for Yelp’s case towards Google. Along with injunctive aid, Yelp seeks a treatment that ensures Google can now not self-preference in native search. The harms brought on by Google’s self-preferencing usually are not distinctive to Yelp, and we stay up for telling our story in court docket.

You may learn the total doc, a 66 page PDF, to undergo the detailed lawsuit.

Jeremy Stoppelman, the founding father of Yelp, wrote, “Our case is about Google, the biggest info gatekeeper in existence, placing its heavy thumb on the size to stifle competitors and preserve shoppers inside its personal walled backyard. Abandoning its acknowledged mission to ship the perfect info to customers, Google has illegally abused its monopoly generally search to dominate the native search and native search promoting markets—participating in anticompetitive conduct that has degraded the standard of search outcomes and demoted rivals to develop its market energy.”

As a reminder, in December 2009, Yelp entered unsuccessful negotiations to be acquired by Google. Google supplied about $500 million, however the deal fell by after Yahoo supplied $1 billion. Then each provides had been later deserted following a disagreement between Yelp’s administration and board of administrators concerning the provides. Yelp and Google don’t get along, they have not actually since this failed acquisition.

As an FYI, in 2013, we lined that Yelp dominated the Google results similar to we did with Reddit in 2024 and Wikipedia before it.

The NY Instances has good coverage of this lawsuit.

Listed here are some takes on X:

Yelp’s CEO:

I ought to add, that after I posted about this on X, the response was not in favor of Yelp from search entrepreneurs and SEOs. Click on by to that X publish to see the responses.

Yelp even made this microsite for this lawsuit.

Discussion board dialogue at X.