Yelp has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The move caps off years of animosity between the two companies, with Yelp alleging that Google has leveraged its control over online searching to dominate local queries and prioritize its own reviews. CNN on the lawsuit.
“Google abuses its monopoly power in general search to keep users within Google’s owned ecosystem and prevents them from going to rival sites,” Yelp Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a announcing the suit. “This anticompetitive conduct siphons traffic and advertising revenue from vertical search services, like Yelp, that provide objectively higher quality local business content for consumers.”
The US lawsuit could carry extra weight following a Department of Justice case where the judge over search. The August ruling did not place any sanctions on Google, but it’s likely that Yelp’s case will be the…
