(Bloomberg) -- Online review site Yelp Inc. filed a lawsuit alleging that Google has illegal monopoly power in local search, in a sign of the legal headaches that may await the search giant following the US government’s landmark antitrust victory against the company. Most Read from Bloomberg Yelp claims the Alphabet Inc.
unit has an unfair edge in the market for local search and associated advertising, both spaces in which the San Francisco-based company has strived to compete with its detailed reviews of restaurants, beauty parlors and other establishments. Yelp has spoken out about what it considers to be Google’s anticompetitive conduct for well over a decade. But the timing of Yelp’s lawsuit, filed just weeks after a Washington federal judge ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market through exclusive deals, suggests that more companies may be emboldened to take action against the search leader in the coming months.
Yelp drew from US District Judge Amit Mehta’s decision to show how Google used its monopoly in the market for all-purpose search engines to dominate other spaces, Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur said in an interview. Mehta’s findings “really do serve as the brick-and-mortar foundation for our own claims,” Schur said. “Our case is asserting that Google has abused that illegal monopoly in general search that has already been decided by Judge Mehta, and it’s using that monopoly to self-preference that inferior content in the adja.