Report from Courthouse News Service
In Brief – A federal judge has rejected keys parts of Google’s motion to dismiss Yelp’s antitrust complaint alleging that the digital giant has a monopoly over local search services and related advertising. Yelp, a platform providing local search and reviews that has been a long-time critic of the digital behemoth, argues that Google uses its dominant general search service to unfairly promote its own specialized local reviews service, directing users away from local search platforms like Yelp regardless of the accuracy or helpfulness of their content. US Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen wrote in her order that Yelp only needed to show a “dangerous probability” of Google having monopoly power in local search for its claims to survive at this point, and that the local search company met the threshold by presenting a range of data on market shares and growth. Yelp’s California state law unfair competition claims will also proceed.
Context – Yelp’s suit aims to build on US District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling that Google’s general search service is a monopoly built and reinforced by its anticompetitive business deals. That DOJ-led antitrust case is now in its remedies phase. Yelp’s complaint argues that Google uses its monopoly in general search to monopolize other adjacent specialized search markets, which are often called search “verticals”. US regulators have rejected pursing complaints from Yelp and other vertical search businesses for years. Judge Mehta dismissed similar vertical search preferencing claims in the case Google ended up losing. However, Google’s vertical search competitors have had more legal and regulatory success in the EU. The “Google Shopping” case, the company’s first antitrust loss in Europe, involved vertical competitors. The EU Digital Markets Act prohibits Google from self-preferencing its verticals in its main search engine. After months of investigation and stakeholder talks regarding Google’s plan to treat vertical competitors more fairly in its European search engines, the European Commission recently issued formal preliminary findings that Google’s plan fails to comply with the landmark digital gatekeeper law.