You are right, at least in the traditional anti-trust-ish legal sense as I understand it.

In a wider more pedestrian sense, there is a some kettle-pot-black involved here, at least in my opinion.

Yelp's a little monopolistic middle man. Everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp because everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp. Market dominance today is the main ingredient for dominance tomorrow. Everyone uses Google search, maps, phones etc. Google gets all the data & ad revenue. They use this to maintain their dominance.

Pick your euphemism for this position: momentum, network effects, buffet's moat, thiel's-monopoly, dominance, viral feedback loops.... Whatever you call it, a restaurant can't opt out of yelp, just like a website can't opt out of google. Their rules are the rules. There is no option B.

A downstream company can be harmed when Google competes direct (AKA the terror of 2006), when they redirect traffic to alternative web pages or disrupts market dominance downstream, intentionally or otherwise.

This is like Yelp's relationship with restaurants. Yelp can stop sending a restaurant customers. Google can stop sending Yelp users. There are no "market dynamics," no "invisible hands," price signals or whatnot. There is no "market" to impose discipline in the way the laissez-faire idealization does on paper.

So... I'm kind of torn. I want to see far more complaints, cases & legislation targeting market dominance, size and monopoly. On the other hand, the hypocrisy...

You're right. This is a kettle-pot issue. So how come so many arguments here get reduced to "I side with kettle!"

Yelp is bad. Google is bad. Or more precisely, both are amoral, and responding rationally to the incentives of the internet. The traditional anti-trust sense you mention doesn't take network effects into account. If you ask me, network effects cause the landscape of the internet to inevitably trend towards oligopoly.

This explains why the strategy of most startups amounts to "Growth at all costs, until you're the only game in town" (The model of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and every wannabe unicorn running at a huge loss to investors)

How is Google amoral?

I agree that the matter is multi-faceted, of course. I just wanted to point out that we can't use a competing service's quality to assess whether market dominance was exerted or not. Neither I think it can be an extenuating factor. One isn't any less a murderer if they kill another murderer.

Should a different case (maybe a class action) be brought against Yelp for abusing its position and momentum to force restaurants into joining the platform? Probably yes, but it would be a different case which, albeit rightful, has nothing to do with the Yelp-Google case.

I suppose, I just don't understand where that line of thinking heads, in terms of an even theoretical resolution.

Yelp sues google for monopolistic practice. Restaurant federations sue yelp. We sue fb for giving us the willies. The lawyers do very well and there's a legal bubble. Peter Thiel automates lawyers, funded by google who by 2026 are sitting on the largest horde of cash ever stashed but technically bankrupt, pending legal appeals and fully tallied lawyer bills. Legal event horizon in 3.. 2.. shoes.

I don't think I speaking besides the issue (apart from the obvious bits). Are either of these companies accused of anything, formally? Murder may be a bit strong.

For what's worth, I never used Yelp in my life. I seem to only remember using Tripadvisor.

Yelp has been horrible since day one. If google has or has not abused its position Yelp is not the standard we would use to determine that.

This makes no sense. Yelp could be the worst company ever created, but if they had market share and Google worked to seize that market with unfair practices, that counts as abuse of dominant position. There is a dangerous conflation of two very distinct categories in your line of thought.

If think the point being made is Amazon didn't suffer the same fate as Yelp wrt to book reviews because Amazon had a better product than whatever Google produced.

You mean Amazon actually has a product. Until yelp started doing deliveries, order now and cashback its product was a content farm.

I know a few people in the restaurant industry (owners/managers). They all say the same thing: at best engaging yelp ( and advertising on yelp ) is a non-negative. It does not bring enough new customers to justify its expense.

The best yelp engagement I saw worked with customers directly: a property manager ran a raffle for half off a months rent. To enter, you just had to leave a review on yelp. They didn’t explicitly ask for good reviews, but the majority were pretty positive.

For about the same amount that yelp wanted for sponsorship, they got over 30 real, quality reviews that complimented the recent improvements that had been made.

Exactly. Do a product search and Amazon one of the top links even though Amazon banned any company on their market place from being allowed to sell several Google products and even hijacked people looking.

Yelp sucks so not a top link. Seems to be working in a fair manner.

The problem comes with the fact that it's possible to game algorithms. We have examples where a poor service or website becomes (remains) popular, because they're good at gaming the system. Eg Pinterest.

Or in the case of the example they brought up in the video, where they counted the number of reviews you could game that system by just creating fake reviews or trying to just get more of them through non-organic ways.

'Eg Pinterest'

A classic example of a business that Google should be using their dominance against, but aren't.

In a roundabout way Google are more like Pinterest than you think. Both utilising other people’s content.

All just glorified databases with different UI really. Yelp kind of has original content in people’s opinion of db entries.

YouTube however is slightly different since people post short and long form video on which is mostly original.

Interesting.

'In a roundabout way Google are more like Pinterest than you think. Both utilising other people’s content.'

True, which makes me wonder why Google don't just add a bit of Pinterest-style functionality and then start applying search quality guidelines against Pinterest?

I know there are copyright issues but I expect Google would do a better job of linking to the original source - something Pinterest seem unable to do at all?

Google spent billions to develop the huge data processing systems and algorithms to eventually leave Yelp behind, like a freight train leaves a horse behind.

Yelp missed the industrialization of their industry by machine.

Knowing what you're doing isn't monopolistic.

> seize that market with unfair practices

Please describe what you consider a fair practice to seize a market in general terms.

The enemy of my enemy is... still horrible.

But, maybe, abusing a dominant position is a lot easier when the competitor's offer is so poor?

For a lot of popular queries the results are dominated by paid directories, aggregators and such that offer no great value to consumers.

Google's listings tend to be more accurate in terms of location and the reviews more reliable.

> You might be right, but a company’s abuse of dominant position isn’t defined by the quality of their competitor’s offer.

And the assumption that Yelp's offer is of poorer quality is debatable. Google's own algorithm apparently often ranks its content lower than its competitors in organic search results.

The second video shows this: they created proof-of-concept plugin that uses Google's own organic search results to power a clone of Google+ local: https://youtu.be/k9UqqmIJW4g