Yelp Sues Google For Antitrust Violations

[Brett_Tabke]

Yelp alleges that Google has created or preserved its monopoly in local search services by preferencing its own inferior vertical over competitors’, which Yelp says harmed competition and reduced the quality of local search services. Yelp claims that the way Google directs users toward its own local search vertical from its general search engine results page should be considered illegal tying of separate products to keep rivals from reaching scale.

[theverge.com...]

[Whitey]

Is this lawsuit just the first of many?

I hope so.

Google has been beyond the reach of accountability to those that depend on it's services for distribution with unfair practices for decades now. And for non branded, small business' it's delivered a world of pain favouring the big guys and it's own search related products.

The search algorithm is unfair (by it's very nature of preferencing and impact on competition), but hopefully these search results and uncompetitive practices will become irrelevant as AI search incumbents use better and fairer techniques to surface content for users in a deeper and more accurate way.

Bringing lawsuits, has a lot of deeper complexities associated with it. I guess everybody will be watching closely.