(NewsNation) — Yelp, an online platform that allows American consumers to write reviews of local businesses, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging the tech giant used its prowess as a dominant search engine to dominate more local searches and gain an unfair advantage for advertisers.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in San Francisco, seeks unspecified monetary damages.
The complaint claims Google uses its “unlawfully maintained dominance” as a search engine to “steer users to its own inferior content to pad its massive revenues.”
“With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages, and prevent Google from engaging in anticompetitive practices so that innovation may flourish,” Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in an online blog post after the lawsuit was filed.
The lawsuit says that Yelp, which was founded in 2004, relies on the sale of local search advertising to survive. The model allows local businesses to advertise directly to potential customers seeking specific businesses and services.
The suit maintains that Google was late in entering the market for local search services provided by Yelp and other local search engines. Rather than using innovation to create a space for itself when it comes to local communities, it has — according to the suit — used its monopoly power in general search to ensure users never get to local search competitors.
In turn, Stoppelman says in the blog post that Google has put “its heavy thumb on the scale to stifle competition and keep consumers within its own walled garden.”
The lawsuit comes less than a month after a U.S. district judge ruled that Google has been illegally exploiting its dominance in the search engine area to squash competition and stifle competition.
The judge’s ruling stated that Google maintains an 89.2% share of the general search market. The percentage increases to 94.9% on mobile devices.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday by Yelp states that Google and Yelp peacefully coexisted and worked together. However, that changed when Yelp officials said the company rebuffed Google’s efforts to purchase Yelp, the complaint alleges.
Google then began a yearslong mission to stymie Yelp’s ability to reach consumers on Google, the lawsuit maintains.
The complaint states that Google went a step further and engaged in numerous antitrust practices, including stealing information from Yelp’s website and pushing it off as its own work. By monopolizing the search market, Google has, the lawsuit said, suppressed competition for local search advertising.
Google did not immediately respond to a request from NewsNation seeking comment on the lawsuit.
Stoppelman wrote in the blog post that by keeping people from leaving Google for search purposes, the company prevents more localized search engines from reaching customers, achieving scale and building helpful content.
As a result, Yelp executives say Google can pay extra fees from local advertisers with little consequence. Stoppelman, citing studies, said that Google has been able to improve its year-over-year advertising revenue by 20% for the past 10 years.
