Yelp slapped Google with an antitrust lawsuit that accuses the search giant of leveraging an illegal monopoly to promote its own reviews at the expense of rivals – just weeks after a federal judge ruled that the Big Tech company was a “monopolist.”
The lawsuit claims Google relies on its dominant hold on general search to “divert traffic away from those rivals and toward Google’s own inferior local search product,” according to the complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Yelp, a longtime Google rival that aggregates customer reviews of restaurants, dentists and countless other businesses, claims the tactics are “part of a deliberate plot to self-preference its own products in all aspects of search.”
“Google’s scheme prevents businesses from reaching customers without paying Google and starves competitors of the traffic and revenues that would allow them to achieve scale and pose a competitive constraint on Google’s conduct,” Yelp’s lawsuit says.
The lawsuit adds yet another legal headache for Google, which could be broken up after US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled earlier this month that it broke antitrust law by making billions of dollars in payments to ensure its search engine is enabled by default on most smartphones.
Google said it will appeal the ruling.
Elsewhere, a separate DOJ antitrust suit aimed at Google’s alleged monopoly over digital advertising begins on Sept. 9. Federal lawyers are seeking an aggressive breakup of Google’s advertising technology business as part of that case.
A Google spokesperson said Yelp’s claims in the lawsuit are “not new.”
“Similar claims were thrown out years ago by the FTC, and recently by the judge in the DOJ’s case,” the Google spokesperson said in a statement. “On the other aspects of the decision to which Yelp refers, we are appealing. Google will vigorously defend against Yelp’s meritless claims.”
The lawsuit also accuses Google of having “scraped” Yelp’s customer reviews to populate its own local search results without giving proper credit or compensation.
In addition, Yelp asserts that Google’s local search results are riddled with errors and of lower quality than its own.
“Google took Yelp’s data, used it for its own competing property to siphon users away from Yelp, and profited,” the lawsuit says.
Yelp said it is seeking a finding of monetary damages against Google as well as an injunction blocking the company from future misconduct.
“Google should not be both the monopoly provider of general search results and the self-preferencing curator of its own local search content,” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a blog post.
“That’s the equivalent of being both the judge and a competitor in the same Olympic event.