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Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

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Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#51

Post by notatoad »

mdasen wrote: post #22
mrunkel wrote: post #13

I find all this hand wringing over Google to be so tiring. Google is doing what is best for it's customers. Be that advertisers and/or searchers. If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. Last I checked, nobody is forced to use google to search for things, nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome. I'm not a laissez-faire capitalist by any means, but I don't see that Google…

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape. It is ok to be dominant in a prod…

>It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas

I think it's a stretch to say that searching for HVAC business listings and searching for HVAC business reviews are really different markets. If google had an HVAC subsidiary and they suppressed all search results and ads for competing HVAC companies, that would be abusing their dominant position in the search market to create dominance in another market. But is it really monopolistic behaviour to use their web search dominance to succeed in a slightly more specific sector of the web search market? You can use google to find reviews of products and services. They advertise alongside those search results. That is their core business. Yelp is a straight-up competitor. "Google is better than us in the market we compete in" isn't a valid anti-trust complaint.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#52

Post by keymone »

kefka wrote: post #44
keymone wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies do you have any evidence of this?

http://nypost.com/2014/10/13/restaurant-fights-yelps-alleged... Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings, because good ratings are hidden since they didn't pay extortion. ----------------------------- https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f/yelp_is_blackma... Yelp "makes 4-5 star reviews go away" when restaurant refuses to pay extortion. ----------------------------- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-yelp…

> Restaurant tells everyone to leave bad ratings

so a PR campaign,

> https://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/zdq0f...

top comment from the same page: so, I found the Yelp page, and there are 26 reviews filtered out. Of those, the reviewers have a combined 27 friends, and they all come from just 5 people. None of them has more than 15 reviews, and the majority have less than 3. If you have almost no friends and almost no reviews, your reviews are probably going to get filtered out. Also, a lot of her 5-star reviews happened in a 3-day period, which reeks of fake-reviews,

> Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion?

you have not yet demonstrated "money means hiding bad reviews" but already sure it's extortion,

> Forbes article - Court Says Yelp Doesn't Extort Businesses

oooook?

> cnet article

article about same business from your first link

> when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need?

you've made a claim, i believe you forgot to include the "proof"? that specific claim by the way is trivially demonstrable using wayback machine

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#53

Post by MichaelBurge »

mrunkel wrote: post #13

I find all this hand wringing over Google to be so tiring. Google is doing what is best for it's customers. Be that advertisers and/or searchers. If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. Last I checked, nobody is forced to use google to search for things, nobody if forced (except for perhaps android users) to use Chrome. I'm not a laissez-faire capitalist by any means, but I don't see that Google…

These anti-trust laws were originally created to whack railroad companies, which had huge capital investments and "natural monopolies".

Google does have some investment in its data centers, but people never make the explicit argument that the $11 billion/year in data centers is what causes them to be a monopoly. They make the much more abstract "market dominance" argument that I don't buy.

The only thing that I'd consider a monopoly in the same spirit would be the ISPs. It's stupid to dig up the streets twice just for "competition", so there's a natural monopoly. And it'd probably cost untold billions to rebuild it.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#54

Post by nradov »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #41
nradov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Google services no longer have competition?

Google Search for a start. Youtube is effectively standing alone in the space. Google Maps is completely dominating the space (in particular there is nothing that replaces the Earth product or the parts of Earth in maps). Gmail is taking over the world over here. Most local mail solutions are irrelevant at this point and the only real alternative to gmail even intentionally is outlook now. Chrome effectively took out…

Bing, Vimeo, Here, Yahoo Mail, Firefox

Some ad blockers can block Google AdSense.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#55

Post by simion314 »

notatoad wrote: post #51
mdasen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape. It is ok to be dominant in a prod…

>It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas I think it's a stretch to say that searching for HVAC business listings and searching for HVAC business reviews are really different markets. If google had an HVAC subsidiary and they suppressed all search results and ads for competing HVAC companies, that would be abusing their dominant positio…

I think the point here is that Google is not returning the best results but pushing it's own other services on top of the list even if in this case other review services are better.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#56

Post by wbl »

haltingthoughts wrote: post #50
baddox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't stifling competition only bad if it harms consumers? I don't understand how what's best for consumers isn't the point.

I should have said looking at whether it is harming consumers now isn't the point. It's how it harms consumers over time. The chilling effect on innovation, the monoculture/fragility, the lock-in will hurt consumers in the long run.

People can compete with Google on quality of reviews. This is attempt to make Google less useful.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#57

Post by tyingq »

simion314 wrote: post #55
notatoad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas I think it's a stretch to say that searching for HVAC business listings and searching for HVAC business reviews are really different markets. If google had an HVAC subsidiary and they suppressed all search results and ads for competing HVAC companies, that would be abusing their dominant positio…

I think the point here is that Google is not returning the best results but pushing it's own other services on top of the list even if in this case other review services are better.

And even when the searcher is VERY specific that they want Yelp...it's right in the query.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#58

Post by foota »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #33
mdasen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they stop doing that, they'll lose their market dominance. That's precisely the issue. It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas. Microsoft had the best operating system and a browser that they wanted people to use. People preferred Netscape, but Microsoft used its OS dominance to kill off Netscape. It is ok to be dominant in a prod…

It is ok to be dominant in a product. You aren't, however, allowed to use the dominance in one product to gain you dominance in other products. Unfortunately there are countless counterexamples. It's an interesting ideal, but without court action it's toothless. And court action risks having a chilling effect on certain kinds of positive forces.

OP mentions it, but this was what bit Microsoft in United States v Microsoft (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C...)

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#59

Post by notatoad »

simion314 wrote: post #55
notatoad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It can be illegal to use your market dominance in one area (search) to reinforce or create market dominance in other areas I think it's a stretch to say that searching for HVAC business listings and searching for HVAC business reviews are really different markets. If google had an HVAC subsidiary and they suppressed all search results and ads for competing HVAC companies, that would be abusing their dominant positio…

I think the point here is that Google is not returning the best results but pushing it's own other services on top of the list even if in this case other review services are better.

It's displaying ads above the search results. That's what google does. It's their whole business. It's not pushing their own review services over yelp, it's advertising alongside search results.

Re: Yelp’s Six-Year Conflict with Google

#60

Post by saurik »

kefka wrote: post #16

Indeed, Google is too big and has a massive effect on the Internet across the whole world. A single capricious decision made by Google/Alphabet can cause dozens of businesses to shutter or fail. And that is a big problem, especially if we care about upstarts and new companies. However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. T…

> However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service.

...and that you have reason to dislike Yelp or even think they are hypocritical does not counteract the problem with Google, which is the topic at hand, making your comment seem like nothing more than a defense of vigilanteism :/.

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