Report from Courthouse News Service
In Brief – Federal Magistrate Judge Susan Van Keulen has ruled that Yelp, a leading internet company critic of Google’s search practices, can rely on District Judge Amit Mehta’s 2024 decision in the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust case in the local search platform’s antitrust lawsuit against the search giant. Yelp alleges that Google suppresses links to specialized search providers in favor of its own services and is seeking damages and an injunction barring Google from continuing the challenged practices. Mehta found that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in general internet search through exclusive default search agreements with companies such as Apple and Samsung. Van Keulen’s decision means that Yelp will not have to prove at trial that Google is a monopolist in general search and the jury will be instructed to accept that fact, allowing the case to focus on whether Google unlawfully used that monopoly to harm competition in local search and local search advertising. Van Keulen’s ruling only applies to Google’s general search through August 2024, requiring Yelp to present additional evidence if it seeks to prove Google’s monopoly power continued beyond that date.
Context – As Google has lost major antitrust decisions, it has faced a growing number of “follow-on” civil antitrust lawsuits. For example, dozens of online comparison-shopping sites in Europe have filed lawsuits aiming to win damages from Google following the final resolution of the European Commission’s Google Shopping antitrust case. Sweden-based PriceRunner recently won a nearly $2 billon award from Google in a Swedish court. Yelp’s lawsuit needs to build on Mehta’s ruling regarding Google’s general search service and apply the decision to Google’s treatment of “vertical search” competitors, the core issue in the EU’s Google Shopping case. If Yelp was arguing their case before Judge Mehta in the DC circuit, it could have proven a tough sell because he rejected aspects of the original Google search case linked to claims of vertical search discrimination at the heart of Yelp’s complaint. But the case is being argued before Van Keulen in federal court in California.