Yelp has slapped Google with an antitrust lawsuit accusing the search giant of leveraging an illegal monopoly to boost its reviews at the expense of rivals — just weeks after a review was published. The federal judge ruled that the Big Tech company was a “monopolist.”
The lawsuit claims that Google uses its dominance in general search “to divert traffic from its competitors to Google's own inferior local search product,” according to the complaint filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.
Yelp, a longtime rival of Google that aggregates customer reviews of restaurants, dentists and countless other businesses, claims these strategies are “part of a deliberate plot to self-prefer its own products across all aspects of search.”
“Google's scheme prevents businesses from reaching customers without paying Google and deprives competitors of the traffic and revenue that would help them achieve scale, and Google's conduct creates an anti-competitive barrier,” Yelp's lawsuit says.
This lawsuit has created yet another legal trouble for Google. that can be broken US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled earlier this month that the company violated anticompetition law by paying billions of dollars to have its search engine enabled by default on most smartphones.
Google said it would appeal the decision.
On the other hand, a separate Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against Google's alleged monopoly on digital advertising begins on September 9. Federal prosecutors are aggressively seeking to divest Google's ad technology business as part of that case.
A Google spokesperson said Yelp's claims in the lawsuit “are not new.”
“Similar claims were rejected by the FTC years ago, and more recently by the judge in the DOJ case,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are appealing other aspects of the decision that Yelp has cited. Google will vigorously defend itself against Yelp's baseless claims.”
The suit also accuses Google of building its own local search results by “destroying” Yelp's customer reviews, without giving proper credit or compensation.
Additionally, Yelp claims that Google's local search results are full of errors and are of lower quality than Google's own search results.
“Google took Yelp's data, used it for its own competing properties in an attempt to drive users away from Yelp, and made a profit,” the lawsuit says.
Yelp said it is seeking monetary damages against Google, as well as an injunction to prevent the company from future misconduct.
“Google should not be both the monopoly provider of general search results and the self-seeking curator of its own local search content,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a blog post.
“It’s the equivalent of being both a judge and a competitor in the same Olympic event.”
