Host this week on the communicators we want to introduce you to luther lowe who was Senior Vice President for Public Policy for for a site cd yelp. What exactly is yelp and what do you do it . Guest thank you so much for having me on today, peter. Its a pleasure. Yelp is a website and piping the 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 gyms, and a way for consumers to warn fellow consumers its not such a great business. Host how many visitors a month do you have . Guest to be not how you want to break it out, theres folks that access it via mobile web, via the website, via the app. Its north of 100 Million People and then we have over 200 million reviews that have been submitted over the course of our life. Host how do you make money . Guest not unlike service like google, it is a vertical Search Engine. Basically if i just search for for a dentist in san diego, there are a handful of dentists who are paying to basically have a sponsored clearly labeled as such link that lived above the organic search results and, therefore, they get more discovery of the business and more people, or patients come to the door. Host you are the senior vp for Public Policy so obviously we have you on the communicators to talk about Public Policy issues. In recent testimony in the senate you are quoted as saying, quote, 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 . Guest yelp and google have had a long and cant locate a relationship, and today one of the key things i do in my role is trying to educate policymakers not just in the United States, in terms of state attorneys general and department of justice, but also the European Commission, the antitrust authorities and 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, its no longer doing that. Today the majority of traffic that goes to google into either terminating on google or going to googles secondary pages. It states on google. Com and winds up going to some type of secondary page inside their walled garden. That wasnt always the case. If you rewind to say 2004 when google went public, larry page, googles cofounder, was quoted and these quotes are included in their documents when they filed ipo with the sec, hes quoted as saying google we want to get you onto google and added to the web as quickly as possible. And, in fact, thats the entire point. Today, not only is that not true but google is during all of this traffic to itself and, therefore, in a sense d oxygenating the entire wide web and stifling innovation and ultimately harming consumers because theyre not getting access to the best information from across the internet. Host my sense would be yelp would depend on google in many ways . Guest its a codependence. When google started it had sort of a dual pledge to consumers. It was, come to google and you will never use yahoo ever again. Focus on cultivating great content and architecture site in this particular ways, that you will be rewarded with an audience. It was this symbiotic organ the google it with all these webmasters in the sense google did a robust helpful content exists on the internet, so it could serve well results and, of course, the trade was a google within reward people that were good at cultivating helpful usergenerated content with an audience. Yelp was an example. Wikipedia is of course another. Host before we go further, we want to bring leah nylen into this conversation. She is with politico. Thank you so much. How were you . Last week the Senate Judiciary committee had a hearing on self referencing which is sort of the issues youve been talking about what a Company Gives more benefits to its own products as opposed to third parties. In your view come how does google preference those products . Guest its worth taking a step back and looking at how ubiquitous and a born of a product tool google is for consumers in terms of helping them discover information across the internet. Today when a mom does a search for pediatrician in st. Louis, its most likely being done on a smartphone device, either by phone or android device. 65 of all search goes through smart phones. Over half a smartphone surge has local intent, so includes, involves a consumer looking for local business. When she does a search for pediatrician in st. Louis, instead of being matched with the best information from across the web, above the organic results, hardwired to the top of the page is a map with links to businesses. But instead of those links going to thirdparty services, its steering users into a a secondy page on google. Com, and thats problematic because what google collects information that it served up, its sort of a yelp wannabes if you will, is objectively lower quality information. The average Character Counts are smaller, the rating distributions are skewed in such a way where there is a strong evidence that spam is running rampant. It has misinformation problem because theyre not investing in a in a commensurate level of human and algorithmic duration to ensure when people when they find information on google, to entrust that its a good predicate of the algorithmic experience. It turns out theres entire ecosystem of thirdparty Services Like yelp that might offer more reviews, richer information for that query. Why does google could exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates for result in the type of search . Thats what the hearing was about in terms of self preference. Can you talk about how yelp has been impacted by googles self preference . Guest sure. If we rewind the clock to 15 years ago, imagine what the experience was for consumer doing a search on google. Its hard to decouple the rise of what tim oreilly, this term that tim oreilly popularized web 2. 0 from the rise of google itself. Its this idea that if google wants to be a turnstile, it used to diffuse virtually 100 of its traffic through the World Wide Web. That pediatrician st. Louis arch, 15 years ago you could imagine 100 people doing that search and just for the sake of argument lets say there are on average ten of them diffused out to the web to the ten ten blues on page one. So each site on page one gets ten users. Today, as just a baseline, about seven in ten ten of those clics done on smart phones are going into googles products. That same 100 people, 70 are just inside googles walled garden. The web has to contend with those 30 minute clicks. That gives you an idea of the quantitative impact. Of course the internet is a lot bigger today so we have lots more searching. Technically some Services Like yelp have grown over time and thats a good thing, but the truth is there are 2 billion types of searches like this everyday on planet earth, local searches, people looking for something as low stakes as a slice of pizza to something highstakes like an auto mechanic or pediatrician, and instead of being matched with the best information from across the web they are being steered unwittingly into this objectively lower quality product. You mention job is been pretty vocal about this all around the world, and in particular in europe. How has of the eu respond to some of the concerns you guys have raised . Guest im glad you asked this question because its important to remember that the European Commission took up these questions immediately after the federal trade commission about seven years ago decided not to take action. One decides not to take action against the dominant firm in an antitrust investigation after you as the regulator you have been persuaded that this big company question is likely to be as they can a few years, perhaps there would be more startups and so forth in that space. I think its fair to say the decision to abruptly closing ftcs investigation into google in 2013, that decision has not aged well. One of the reasons it has not clearly is europe look at the same set of evidence, took more time to carefully that the evidence, and came to the opposite conclusion and ultimately issued a finding of guilt for this practices against google. Do you think efforts by the European Commission to inject greater competition into search has been successful . Guest its a bit of a mixed bag. Im very thankful for the work of the European Commission on this in the leadership and, frankly, i dont think the socalled backlash would exist without what happened in april 2015 exhibiting that she was willing to square shoulders with one of these large companies. On the other hand, the commission chose to take a pretty narrow case, the socalled comparisonshopping, vertical. Basically how we shop for online. It was originally filed in 2010, and i would argue they are effectively sinning and angles to the funeral. That industry is 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 help president but ultimately those markets have already tipped to a way they cannot be salvaged. And so im thankful for their enforcement action. Im not sure i wouldve taken the same theory of harm out. Host luther lowe, is it fair to say youre looking at google as more of a public utility and a private company . Guest i dont know if i would go that far. I think that google has the right to innovate. They have the right to create great product. They won on the merits the general search. The page rank algorithm, the type of quality scores they developed in the late 90s, clearly was a differentiated product, and thats what everybody ultimately flocked to google. The problem is once you establish that dominance, and this happened about a decade into googles existence, they introduced, they were running originally organic search results and advertisements. I dont think thats controversial. It was when they began introducing his third category of information, answer boxes. Sometimes an answer box isnt that controversial. Factbased information at the top of the page, i didnt have to go to calculate. Com. If you are doing the search for the auto mechanic in madison, wisconsin, you know, why would you exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates of relevant results so google can sort of put this exclusionary box at the top of the page must thats whats happened today in the most common category of search, over 40 of all Google Searches have his type of local content. Im not sure it requires turning them into a public utility to fix that. I know some of talked about certain aspects of the business, like maybe the google maps are factbased information. Its the fact and they clearly dominated that space as well. Perhaps i could be in area to look at, but were not calling for that. Host what is the Public Policy solution to the complaint that yelp has about google . Guest i think its the same. We have tools and the United States to do with abuse of dominance and it is our antitrust laws, sherman, section two. We saw this ironically in the late 90s with u. S. Versus microsoft which most antitrust asteroids will tell you today that the trial was the remedy. Though many may remember u. S. Versus microsoft as a stalemate between the u. S. Government and this giant company from redmond washington that dragged on through 2006, that by enforcing the antitrust law, the tendency of microsoft to stand delancy zi and ask himself gosh, what markets bulldozed bulldozing th our dominant operating system and browsers . They couldnt do that as easily. The company ironically benefited from the most was google. Six months after u. S. Versus microsoft was filed, google was born in the garage, and microsoft at 90 market share at the time on internet explorer. You can easily imagine the alternative universe where microsoft or gates said hey, looks like all our users are going to this Google Search engine site and thats where the action is on the internet. Why dont we read the original research papers, throw 50 million of research at the problem and steer people to our own Search Engine . They could have strangled a google in the crib but that didnt happen because i think the product managers and engineers 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 market markets. There some Competition Advocates of raise questions about whether u. S. Antitrust law is capable of addressing some of these concerns. Do you think u. S. Antitrust laws are robust enough for doesnt need to change . Guest its a question we get often, should we use existing frameworks to do with a company like google or do we need to pass new laws . My response is typically yes. Because i think that any tools we can bring to bear to give enforcers the power to address these difficult issues, we are supportive of. That said, i think that there is a framework to use existing law to bring a u. S. Versus microsoft stock is against google. I think there are unfortunately over the last couple of decades has been a culture of under enforcement that we need to overcome. And i think Congress Stepping in and proposing these laws helps address that issue, that problem, that are agencies, our enforcement agencies being gun shy. The entire zeitgeist has shifted. People want some type of enforcement action against large tech companies, and i think u. S. Government has the tools to do it and theres no harm in bringing new tools to the table as well. Lets talk about a couple other topics. You had mentioned and edwin knows that misinformation is a a pretty serious problem on the web. How does yelp deal with questions about misinformation and fake reviews . Guest its a really important question. In fact, its been top of mine since day one. Our ceo was part of the socalled paypal mafia which was a group of early employees at paypal in the late 90s, and people forget about the history of paypal. In the early days the concept of cinnamon over the internet the email was just insane. David keating besieged by fraud and every day some macedonian cyber criminals defrauding more other customers. So they were losing 1 million a day to fraud and 81 came out of that experience with a view that what can go wrong will go wrong. We need to almost over correct on this problem in the aware of that will be going to build new companies that this has to be top of mind. Very early on in our existence we saw what were obviously fake reviews and at such develop a Software Recommendation system, a filter, and algorithm so to speak that allows every single day looks at our 200 million plus reviews and examines things like user ip address, the activity and things that were hoping to make basically a prediction of the operative system. Its pretty good. If you think about a crummy business expense you had an ano crosscheck on yelp, i have nine of the ten success rate. Its a very good predictor and is because willing to accept false positives but sometimes that glowing fivestory view from your cousin mary is likely to make it onto your yelp page. Thats going to irritate the Business Owner. It is led to a lot of conspiracy theories frankly but its our willingness to err on the side of caution and ultimately better predict consumers operating expenses that has made it so popular with consumers. Host on the flip side, i consumers liable for negative reviews . Guest its a great question. Its an important question because in certain instances yes, of course, if the consumer god for bid use our platform to defame the business, they should be held liable and the business is well within its rights to sue that individual. On the other hand, and, frankly, more often what we see is overly litigious businesses imagine a grad student writing a negative review, and on his negative review about an experience with maybe a shady dentist that they had. This dennis is thinskinned and calls his lawyer buddy and says hey, i want to get this review off the internet. Can we write them is scary letter . They send the letter and most of the time the user will just pull the information off the web and say i dont want to enter into a lawsuit with this deeppocketed contest. The antidote to this, frankly publicpolicy problem for consumers is, antislapp laws. It stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. States like texas a rush on once. An example of using a grad student could go to a defense attorney can use defense attorney could go seek an injunction against the dennis and actually get attorneys fees and find the dentist for that. Some states have no antislapp laws. At the federal level with two antislapp laws so this is another issue comes working to ensure that the environment for online free speech is hospitable. We want to make sure businesses have the right to sue individuals if god for bid there is defamation on the web, you will be seeing much more pronounced problem is people using the court as a way to silence critics, and that we believe is wrong and we want to do what we can to advocate for laws which minimize that. One thing at the very top of my mind now is a coronavirus pandemic witches change a lot about america to working in socializing. I think its probably impacting a lot of the local businesses you guys have reviews on like restaurants and bars in gyms and things of that nature. How is yelp responding to the coronavirus . Guest this has been, ive been at yelp for 12 years and its been one of the most, is the most incredible and frankly terrible thing to witness in terms of what is happening to main street right now. 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. We are still operationally adjusting as a company. Everybody is working remotely now. We are an Internet Company so that is easier than most companies have it, but i think that its something that is going to be, you know, have a least a multimonth devastating impact impact on these Small Businesses. My emphasis in the last handful of days has shifted into how can yelp help advocate to congress that whatever really packages come through include meaningful relief for Small Business owners . Because they are getting hit the hardest. One of the thing congress and the Justice Department have been looking at resources section 230 of the few medications decency act. This is a law that shields tech company from liability over user content. What are your views about section 230 . Guest that might be unpopular thing in washington these days but we are fans of section 230. We get asked a lot these days. My response is will we be having this conversation about section 230 if there were, if we lived in the alternate universe where facebook and google did not exist . The ants across the board has. And so i encourage individuals to think about other publicpolicy tools that exist to address the negative externalities that come with bigness and the abuse of dominance. We think that by using tools like antitrust to reduce the bigness of these firms, encourage more pluralism on the web, allow more voices to arise, encourage competition between platforms, enables a market approach to do with these issues and we are opposed to any type of radical reform to section 230. How might it impact yelp if section 230 section 230 were changed . Guest you can imagine a situation where the example i described earlier about the litigious Business Owner who feels compelled to sue the individual, whether or whether not it is a frivolous lawsuit, they can now absent 230 call yelp as as a codefendant in the case. That just creates an unscalable and insurmountable cost of doing business that just would not allow Services Like yelp to exist. It is an axiomatic foundational necessity for the internet as we know it to exist, and and i jut dont think, i think we should be exploring other publicpolicy tools to grapple with facebook and google before putting 230 on the table. Host but doesnt yelp have some liability if the fraudulent Business Post on your site . Guest well, we take, we have a lot of mechanisms to ensure that at the end of the day the information were providing to consume is trustworthy and useful and there are a lot of mechanisms in place that we provide that to 30 allows us to provide. The first is Recommendation Software that on any given day putting into a not recommend state about 24 of reviews submitted comes about taking on reviews that in that raid mistake. Consumers click on it. Most dont but imagine your damn folder under your email. The other we have is of an army of human beings that are constantly looking at flags. A Business Owner, a consumer can flag earlier and say hey, this violates guidelines. We were review, would likely fall into that example. Iq and being heavily weights and says gosh, yes, this does violate our guidelines. We will manually pull that off. I just dont think bringing 230 into the competition is a useful a productive way to develop policy that is going to encourage a competitive and consumer from the internet. Host what is yelp based and are you a Public Company . Guest we are based in san francisco. With offices in handful of cities across the u. S. Including washington, d. C. We have i believe about 6000 employees today and we are publicly traded under the sign yelp. Host what were your revenues in 2019 . Guest you will have two call my cfo and ask that. I am very focus on my work in terms of educating policymakers, and this is an answer that i should know the answer to this question but off the top of my head this passport i do not know. Host how did you get to yelp . Guest i used to work in politics and originally from arkansas, and it was 2007 and i was quietly rooting for obama. All of my mentors who grew up in bill clintons shadow, growing up in Arkansas City hillary has this in the back, you have to get under the hillary train now. So i said, im just going to take a sidestep from politics and as result of google, the internet, the consumer web was really excited at the time suck put all my stuff in my car, drove to san francisco, applied for a lowlevel gate at yelp off of a craigslist ad and it was the first place that hired me, and there was about 100 of us at the time and like i said this is looks like a pretty interesting company. Im going to write this out. Host from that humble beginning, luther lowe is a Senior Vice President for Public Policy at yelp. Leah nylen covers antitrust at political. Thank you both for being on thee communicators. Tonight on the communicators yelps publicpolicy Vice President luther lowe on digital competition and why he thinks google has betrayed the internet. Hes any goodbye neil hes interviewed by leah nylen. Google is during this traffic to the south and the oxygenating the entire World Wide Web and stifling innovation and
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