This week on the communicators we want to introduce you to the Senior Vice President for Public Policy for a site called yelp. What exactly is yelp and what you do . Thank you for having me on today, peter. Populara website and consumer application that allows people to connect with rate local businesses. It is a service that empowers and protects consumers, allows people to discover rate local tos, at a way for consumers warn fellow consumers about not so great businesses. Host how many visitors a month to have . Guest depending on how you break it out, there are folks who access it via mobile web, the website, the app, it is north of 100 Million People then we have 200 million reviews that have been submitted. Host how to make money . Guest yelp is a vertical search engine, not unlike google if i do a search for a dentist in san diego, there are handful of totists who are paying basically have a sponsored, clearly labeled as such, link, that lives above your organic search results. Therefore they get more discovery of their business and more people are patients coming through their door. Host you are the senior vp for Public Policy. We have you on the camino caters to talk about Public Policy issues. In recent testimony in the senate, you are quoted as saying, google has conditioned consumers to expect for the best and most relevant results from around the web, even though they no longer were by doing so. Google physically demoted nongoogle results even if they contained information with Higher Quality scores. Mean . Oes that guest yelp and google have had a long and complicated relationship. Today in my role i educate policymakers in the United States, in terms of state attorney general and the prophet of justice, but also the European Commission, the antitrust authorities in australia and brazil and turkey, that a website that we once trusted and relied upon to match consumers with the best information from across the web, when they came to google. Com. It is no under doing that. Today the majority of traffic that goes to google ends up either terminating on google are going to google secondary pages. So it stays on google. Com and winds up going to some type of second page inside their Walled Garden. That was not always the case. If you rewind to 2004 when google went public, larry page, googles cofounder, was quoted in these quotes are included in their s1 documents, when they filed for an ipo with the sec, he is quoted as saying, at google we want to get you onto google and out into the web as quickly as possible. Entire fact, that is the point. Today, not only is that not true , but google is steering all of this traffic to itself. And therefore in a sense the oxygenating the entire worldwide web and stifling innovation, and harming consumers because they are net getting access to the best information from across the internet. Host my sense would be that a yelp would depend on google in many ways. Guest as a codependency. When google started it had a it wasedge to consumers a come to google and you will never use altavista or yahoo ever again. Two webmasters were business it was, focus on cultivating great content and architecture your site in particular ways, and you will be rewarded with an audience. Bargainhe sib janik that google entered with all these webmasters sib janik bargain. Bargain. Symbiotic google needed quality relevant results and google would reward people who are good at cultivating helpful User Generated Content with an audience. Yelp is one example and wikipedia is another. Host we want to wrinkle leah leahd we want to bring nylund with politico into the conversation. Last week the Senate Judiciary committee had a hearing on self preference and, the issue you have been talking about. Where a Company Gives more benefits to its own products as opposed to third parties. In your view, how does google preference self products . Guest it is worth taking step back to look at how ubiquitous and important a product into google is for consumers to help them discover information across the internet. Today when a mom does a search for a pediatrician in st. Louis, it is most likely done on a smart phone, her iphone or android device. 65 percent of all search goes through smartphones. Has of smartphone search local intent. It involves a consumer looking for a local business. When she does a search for the pediatrician in st. Louis, instead of being matched with the best information from across the web, above the organic result, hardwired to the top of that page, is a map with links to businesses. But, instead of those links going to third party services, it is steering users into a secondary page on google. Com. , becauseroblematic when google collects in the information it serves up, it is a yelp want to be if you well. It is subjectively lower quality information. The average Character Counts are smaller and the rating distributions are skewed in such a way where theres a strong evidence that spam is running rampant. It has a misinformation problem because they are not investing in the commensurate level of human and algorithmic duration to ensure when people find information on google, that they can trust it is a good predictor of the offline experience. Ration. Ithmic cure there is an ecoof thirdparty Services Like yelp that might offer more reviews, richer information for the query. So why does google get to exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates for relevant results that type of search . That is what i think that here was about in terms of self preference. Host can you talk about how yelp has been impacted by googles self prefacing . Preference . Guest sure. If we rewind the clock to 15 years ago and imagine expense for consumer during a search on google, it is hard to decouple the rise of what tim oreilly popularized, web 2. 0. From the rise of google itself. It is the idea that google used to be a turnstile. Diffuse virtually 100 of its traffic through the web. That pediatrician st. Louis search, 15 years ago, you can imagine one her people doing the say 10 of thems defused out to the web, to the 10 blue links on page one. So, each side on page one gets 10 users. Baseline, about seven intent of those clicks done on smartphones, are going into googles product. That same one had her people, 70 have gone, are just inside thates Walled Garden of same 100 people, 70 are inside googles Walled Garden. In the internet is bigger today so we have a lot more searching. Technically some Services Like yelp have grown over time and that is good. But there are 2 billion types of searches like this everyday on planet earth, local searches. Stakes,ng from low looking for a slice of pizza, to high stakes, looking for a pediatrician or auto mechanic. And there being steered into this. Respondedhas the eu to some of the concerns you have raised . Guest im glad you asked. It is important to remember the European Commission took up these questions immediately after the federal trade Commission Seven years ago decided not to take action. One decides not to take action against the dominant firm in an antitrust investigation after u. S. The regulator have been persuaded that this big company in question is not going to be as big in a few years. Perhaps there will be more startups in that space. I think its fair to say the decision to abruptly close the f tc investigation into google in 2013, that decision has not aged well. One reason it has not is that europe looked at the same set of evidence, it took more time to carefully that the evidence, and came to the opposite conclusion. It ultimately issued a finding of guilt for these practices against google. To think the efforts by the European Commission to inject greater competition into search have been successful . Guest it is a mixed bag. Im thankful for the work of the European Commission on this and the leadership. I do not think the socalled tech lash would exist without that exhibit in april of 2015, that they were willing to square shoulders with a large company. On the other hand, the commission chose to take a narrow case, the socalled comparisonshopping vertical. Basically how we shop for products online. It was originally filed in 2010. I would argue they are effectively sending an ambulance to the funeral. That industry has already been vanquished. Googles entrance into the market distorted it and created a Landing Strip for jeff bezos to come in and effectively conquer online shopping. Result in precedent but ultimately those markets have already tipped in a way that they cannot be salvaged. Im thankful for their enforcement action. Im not sure i would have taken the same theory of harm. Lowe, is it fair you are a good looking at google is more of a public utility than a private company . Guest i do not know that i would go that far. Will has a right to innovate. They have the right to create great product. They one on the merits of general search, the page rank al gore them, the type of quality scores they developed in the late 1990s, clearly was a differentiated product. Is why everybody ultimately flocked to google. The problem is, once you establish that dominance, and this happened decade into googles existence, the introducedthey were running originally organic search results and advertisements, i do nothing that is controversial. It was when they began introducing this third category of information. Answer boxes. Sometimes an answer box is not that controversial. If i put a four on the screen when some buddy types and two plus two, we can agree that would be good for consumers. I did not have to go to calc later. Com and reenter it. Calculator. Com and reenter it. But if youre doing a search for the auto mechanic in madison, wisconsin, why would you exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates and the relative put thiso google can exclusionary box at the top of the page. That is what is happening today in the most common category of search. A conservative estimate says 40 of all Google Searches have this local intent. Requires turning them into a public utility to fix that. Some have talked about certain aspects of the business, like maybe ugo maps, are factbased information. Maybe google maps. And they have clearly dominated that space. Perhaps that could be an area to look at. But we are not calling for that. Host so what is the Public Policy solution to complete that yelp path goal . Guest i to get us the same. We have tools in the United States to deal with abuse of dominance. It is our antitrust laws. The sherman, section two. We saw this, ironically, in the late 1990s, with the u. S. Versus microsoft, which most antitrust historians will type today that, the trout was the remedy. Though many the trial was the remedy. Many may remember the u. S. Versus microsoft as estelle may between the Us Government catch a stalemate. By enforcing the antitrust law, the tendency of microsoft to scan the landscape and asked themselves, what new markets can we bulldoze into today with our dominant operating system and browsers, they cannot do that as easily. The company that ironically benefited from that most is google. Six month after u. S. Force microsoft was filed, google was born in a garage. Atrosoft had 9 market share that time on internet explorer. You can 90 . You can easily imagine the alternate universe where gates said, it looks like all of our googles are going to this all of our users are going to this Google Search site. Why do we read their original research papers, throw 15 million of research at the problem, and steer people to our own search engine. They could have strangled google in the crib that did not happen. Because i think the product managers and engineers and microsoft at the time were probably having to email lawyers to see if they could go to the water fountain. Let alone enter adjacent markets. Host some Competition Advocates have raised questions about whether u. S. Antitrust law is capable of addressing some of these concerns. To think u. S. Antitrust law is robust enough or does it need to be changed . Guest it is a question we get often. Should we fix existing frameworks or do we need to pass new laws . My responses typically, yes. I think any tools we can bring to bear to give enforcers the power to address these issues, we are supportive of. That said, there is a framework to use existing law to bring a u. S. Versus microsoft style case against google. I think there unfortunately over the last couple of decades, has been a culture of under enforcement that we need to overcome. Congress stepping in and even proposing his laws helps address problem ournd that agencies, of our enforcement agencies being gun shy. The zeitgeist has shifted. Actionwant enforcement against Large Tech Companies and i think the u. S. Government has the tools to do it and theres no harm in bringing new tools to the table as well. Host ok. I would like to talk about other topics. Everyoneentioned and knows that misinformation is a serious problem on the web. How does yelp deal with questions about misinformation and fake reviews . Guest it is a really important question. It has been top of mind since day one. Wasceo, jeremy stockman, part of the socalled paypal mafia, which was a group of early implies that paypal in the late 1990s. People forget about the history of paypal. In the early days, the concept of sending money over the internet via ima was insane. So they were getting via email. There were getting besieged everyday by fraud and everyday some macedonian cyber criminal was defrauding more their customers. So they were losing 1 million per day to fraud. Everyone came out of the experience with a view that what can go wrong will go wrong. And we need to most over cracked on this problem. Correct on this problem and when we build companies this has to be top of mind. Sawy in yelps existents we fake review and we iterated upon assad for recommendation system. A filter and algorithm that allows that everyday looks set out to hunter million reviews and examines everyday looks at our 200 million reviews. It examines the ip experience and other data to make sure it is a good review experience. If you think about a crummy expense you have had and you crosscheck on yelp, ive had a nine 10 personal success in that anecdotal methods. I think it is because we were willing to accept false positives. Sometimes that glowing fivestar review from your cousin mary will not make it on your yelp page. It will irritate the Business Owner. It has led to a lot of conspiracy theories, frankly. But it is our willingness to air on the side of caution and ultimately better predict the consumers offline experience that has made us so popular with consumer. Host on the flipside, our consumers liable for negative reviews . Guest it is a great question and an important question. In certain instances, yes. If a consumer is using their platform to defame a business, they should be held liable. And a business is well within their rights to pursue the individual. Ise often, what we see overly litigious this misses imagine overly litigious businessesimagine a grad student writing an honest review of may a shady dentist. This dentist is in skin and calls his lawyer and says i want to get this review off the internet, can we write them a scary letter . They send a letter and most of the time the user will just pull that information off the web and say, i do not want to enter into a lawsuit with this deeppocketed dentist. And the antidote to this, frankly, Public Policy problem for consumers, is antislap laws. Stands for strategic lawsuit against Public Participation and texas has strong ones. A grad student could go to a defense attorney. The defense attorney could seek injunction against the dentist and get attorneys fees. And find dentist find the dentist for that. Slappstates have no anti laws and at the federal level we do not have them. So yelp works to ensure the online environment for free speech is hospitable. We want to make sure businesses have the right to sue individuals if there is defamation on the web but where we see more pronounced problem is people using the courts as a way to silence critics. That, we believe, is wrong and we want to do what we can to advocate for laws which memorize that. Host one thing that is top of my now is the coronavirus pandemic. It is changing a lot about how americans are working and socializing. Businessesting local you have reviews on, like restaurants and bars. How is yelp responding to coronavirus . At i have been at well yelp for 12 years, and it has been the most incredible and terrible thing to witness in terms of what is happening to main street now. Has one of the best data sets in terms of understanding the realtime impact on main street coronavirus is having. We are operationally adjusting as a company. Everybody is working remotely now. We are an internet company. Easier than most companies have it. But it is going to have a multimonth devastating impact on the Small Businesses. Emphasis in the last days has shifted into, how can yelp advocate to congress that whatever relief packages come through include meaningful relief for Small Business owners . Because they are getting hit the hardest. Congress other thing and the Justice Department have been looking at his section 230 of the commune occasions decency act which shields Tech Companies from liability over user content. Communications decency act. Might be an unpopular thing to say in washington but we are fans of section 230. We get asked about it these days. Is, would weften be having this conversation about cda 230, if there wereif we lived in the alternate universe where facebook and google did not exist . The answer a