Peter this week on the communicators, we want to introduce you to luther lowe, who is the Senior Vice President for Public Policy for a site called yelp. Mr. Lowe, what exactly is yelp, and what do you do . Luther thank you for having me on today, peter. It is a pleasure. Yelp is a website and Popular Consumer application that allows people to connect with great local businesses. It is a service that empowers and protects consumers, allows people to discover great local gems, at a way for consumers to warn fellow consumers about not so great businesses. Host how many visitors a month to have . Luther 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 do you make money . Luther yelp is a vertical Search Engine, not unlike google. If i do a search for a dentist in san diego, there are handful of dentists who are paying to 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, more patients coming through their door. Host mr. Lowe, you are the senior vp for Public Policy. So obviously we have you on 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 than the information. What does that mean . Luther yelp and google have had a long and complicated relationship. Today, one of the key things i do in my roo role is try to educate policymakers in the United States, in terms of state attorneys general and the department 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 longer doing that. Today, the majority of traffic that goes to google ends up either terminating on google are going to googles 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, say, 2004, 15 or 16 years ago, when google went public, larry page, googles cofounder, was quoted , and these quotes are included in their s1 documents, when they filed for an ipo with the fec, s. E. C. , he is quoted as saying, at google, we want to get you onto google and out into the web as quickly as possible. And, in fact, that is the entire point. Today, not only is that not true, but google is steering all of this traffic to itself, and therefore, in a sense, the deoxygenating the entire worldwide web and stifling ,nnovation, and, ultimately 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. Luther it is a codependency. When google started, it had a dual pledge to consumers it was. It was, come to google and you will never use altavista or yahoo ever again. Focus on cultivating great content and architecture your site in particular ways, and you will be rewarded with an audience. It was the symbiotic bargain that google entered with all these webmasters. Google needed robust helpful content, and the trade was google would then reward people who are good at cultivating helpful usergenerated content with an audience. Yelp is one example of those services. Wikipedia is another. Host before we go any further, we want to bring in leah nylund into the conversation. She is with politico. Leah thank you so much. Last week, the Senate Judiciary committee had a hearing on self preferencing, 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 . Luther 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 of all search goes through smartphones. Over half of smartphone search has 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. And that is problematic, because what google collects and the information it serves up, it is a sort of a yelp wannabe, if you will, it is subjectively lower quality information. The average Character Counts are smaller, 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 curation to ensure that people, when they find information on google, that they can trust it is a good predictor of the offline experience. That is not to say that yelp should be in there, necessarily, it turns out that there are thirdparty Services Like yelp that might offer more reviews, richer information for that query. So why does google get to exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates for relevant results in that type of search . That is what i think that here was about in terms of self preferencing. Leah can you talk a little bit about how yelp has been impacted by googles self preferencing . Luther 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 , this term that tim oreilly popularized, web 2. 0, from the rise of google itself. It is the idea that google used to be a turnstile. It used to diffuse virtually 100 of its traffic through the web. So that pediatrician st. Louis search, 15, 16 years ago, you could imagine 100 people doing the search, and lets say, on average, 10 of them defused out to the web, to the 10 blue links on page one. So, each site on page one gets 10 users. Today, as just a baseline, about seven in 10 of those clicks done on smartphones, are going into googles product. So of that same 100 people, 70 of them have gone are just inside googles walled garden. The web has to contend and fight for those remaining 30 clicks. That gives you an idea of the quantitative impact. Course, 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. People looking for something from low stakes, looking for a slice of pizza, to something that is high stakes, like looking for a pediatrician or auto mechanic. Instead of being matched with the best information across the web, they are being steered, unwittingly, into an objectively lower quality product. Vocalyelp has been pretty about this all over the world. How has the eu responded to some of the concerns you have raised . Luther im so glad you asked this question. It is important to remember the European Commission took up these questions immediately after the federal trade commission, about seven years ago, decided not to take action. I think one decides not to take action against the dominant firm in an antitrust investigation after you, as 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 and so forth in that space. I think its fair to say that the decision to abruptly close the ftc investigation into google in 2013, that decision has not aged well. One reason it has not, clearly, is that europe looked at the same set of evidence, took more time to carefully vet the evidence, and came to the opposite conclusion. It ultimately issued a finding of guilt for these practices against google. Leah do you think the efforts by the European Commission to inject greater competition into search have been successful . Luther it is a bit of a mixed bag. I think im very thankful for the work of the European Commission on this and the leadership, and, frankly, i do not think the socalled tech lash would exist without that in april of 2015, exhibiting that she was willing to square shoulders with a large company. On the other hand, the commission chose to take a pretty narrow case, this socalled comparisonshopping vertical. Basically how we shop for products online. It was originally filed in 2010. And i would argue that they are effectively sending an ambulance to the funeral. That that industry has already been vanquished. Googles entrance into the market distorted it, created a Landing Strip for jeff bezos to come in and effectively conquer online shopping. And it may result in precedent , but ultimately, those markets have already tipped in a way that they cannot be salvaged. And so im thankful for their enforcement action. Im not sure i would have taken the same theory of harm. Route. Host luther lowe, is it fair that you are a good looking at google as more of a public utility than a private company . Luther i do not know that i would go that far. I think that google has a right to innovate. They have the right to create great product. They won on the merits of general search, the page rank algorithm, the type of quality scores that they developed in the late 1990s, clearly was a differentiated product. And that is why everybody ultimately flocked to google. The problem is, when you once you establish that dominance, and this happened a decade into googles existence, they were introduced they were running originally, organic search , results and advertisements, i. I dont think 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 somebody types two plus two, we can agree that would be good for consumers. I did not have to go to calculator. Com and reenter that thing. But if youre doing a search for , you know, the auto mechanic in madison, wisconsin, why would you exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates, relevant s of relevant results, so google can put this 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 that over 40 of all Google Searches have this type of local intent. Im not sure it requires turning them into a public utility to fix that. I know some have talked about certain aspects of the business, like maybe the google maps are factbased information. Where stuff is in the world is a fact, and they have clearly dominated that space. As well. 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 the complaint that yelp has about google . Luther i think it is the same. You know, we have tools in the United States to deal with abuse of dominance, and it is our antitrust laws. Sherman, section 2. We saw this, ironically, in the late 1990s, with the u. S. V. Microsoft, which most antitrust historians will tell you today that the trial was the remedy. Many may remember the u. S. V. Microsoft as this stalemate between the u. S. Government. By enforcing the antitrust law, the tendency of microsoft to scan the landscape and ask themselves, what new markets can we bulldoze into today with our dominant operating system and browsers . They could not do that as easily. The company that ironically benefited from that most is google. Six month after u. S. V. Microsoft was filed, google was born in a garage. Microsoft had 90 market share at that time on internet explorer. You can easily imagine the alternate universe where gates said, hey, it looks like all of our users are going to this Google Search site. That is where the action is on the internet. Why dont we read their original research papers, throw 15 million of research at the problem, and steer people to our own Search Engine . And, you know they could have , strangled google in the crib , but that did not happen. Because i think the product managers and engineers and at 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. Leah so some Competition Advocates have raised questions about whether u. S. Antitrust law is actually capable of addressing some of these concerns. Do you think u. S. Antitrust law is robust enough, or does it need to be changed . Luther i think that it is a question we get often. Should we fix existing framework to deal with a company like google, or do we need to pass new laws . My response is typically, yes. Because i think any tools we can bring to bear to give enforcers the power to address these difficult issues, we are supportive of. That said, there is a framework to use existing law to bring a u. S. V. 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. I think that Congress Stepping in and even proposing these laws helps address that issue and , that problem that, you know, our agencies, our enforcement agencies are being a bit gun shy. The zeitgeist has shifted. People want enforcement action 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. Leah ok. I would like to talk about other topics. You had mentioned and everyone knows that misinformation is a serious problem on the web. How does yelp deal with questions about misinformation and fake reviews . Luther it is a really important question. In fact, it has been top of mind since day one. Our ceo, jeremy stoppelman, was part of the socalled paypal mafia, which was a group of early employees at 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 email was insane. Every day, so they were getting besieged 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 almost over correct on this problem and be , when we go on to build companies, this has to be top of mind. Early on in yelps existence, we saw a fake review, and we iterated upon it for a recommendation system. A filter and algorithm that allows that everyday looks at our 200 million reviews. It examines the ip address and activity, and other data to make sure it is a good review experience. And it works. It is pretty good. If you think about a crummy expense you have had, and you crosscheck on yelp, ive had a nine of personal success in that 10 anecdotal method. I think it is because we were willing to accept false positives. Sometimes, that glowing fivestar review from your cousin mary is not going to 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 err 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, are consumers liable for negative reviews . Luther it is a great question. It is an important question. In certain instances, yes. If a consumer, god forbid, 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. More often, what we see is overly litigious es imagine a grad student writing an honest review of a shady dentist. Dentist 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 p laws. Slapp stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. Texas has really strong ones. In the example i am using, a grad student could go to a defense attorney. The defense attorney could seek injunction against the dentist and get attorneys fees. And fine the dentist for that. Some states have no antislapp laws, and at the federal level, pp do not have antisla laws. 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, god forbid, 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. One thing that is top of mind right now is the coronavirus pandemic. It is changing a lot about how americans are working and socializing. It is impacting local businesses you have reviews on, like restaurants and bars and things of that nature. How is yelp responding to coronavirus . Luther i have been at yelp for 12 years, and it has been the most incredible and terrible , frankly, terrible thing to witness in terms of what is happening to main street now. I think, i would argue yelp , probably has one of the best if not the best data sets in terms of understanding the realtime impact on main street that coronavirus is having. Know, we are still operational