EU: Yelp’s CEO makes the case against Google’s search monopoly

When European antitrust regulators announced a €2.4 billion (US$2.7 billion) fine against Google in late June, few people had more reason to celebrate than Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, reports Vox.

Stoppelman argues that Google has hurt Yelp by artificially putting links to Google’s own Yelp competitor — previously named Google Places and renamed Google My Business in 2014 — ahead of Yelp’s in Google search results; Yelp argues that results like that are destroying its business. Yelp is the online destination for customer reviews of local businesses, or it was. Yelp is having a harder time getting eyeballs on the site because Google places results from Yelp beneath results linked to its own mapping service.

Google was hit with the largest fine European antitrust regulators have ever handed down last week—US$2.7 billion. Although that fine was not directly relevant to local business search, it does raise the possibility of further questioning of Google favoring results from its own digital products over those from other companies.