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Website via the app but its north of 100 Million People and then we have over two and a million reviews that have been submitted. Host how do you make money . Guest yelp not unlike services with google it is a vertical Search Engine that basically if i do a search 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 lives above the organic search results and therefore they get more discovery of their business and more patients coming through the door. Host mr. Lowe, you are the senior vp for Public Policy so we have you on the communicators to talk about Public Policy issues and in a 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 but google physically demoted non google 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, gated relationship and today one of the key things that i do in my role is try to educate policymakers, not just in the United States, but in terms of state attorney generals in the department of justice but also the European Commission, antitrust authorities in australia and brazil and turkey that a website that we once trusted and relied upon to match consumers with the best of duration him across the web when they came to google. Com 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 but stays on google. Com and winds up going to some type of secondary page inside their pardon. That was not always the case. If you rewind to 2004, when google went public, larry page was coded as in these quotes are actually included in their f1 documents when they filed for the ipo with the fcc quoted as saying, you know, a google we want to get you onto google and out into the web as quickly as possible and in fact thats the entire point but today not only is that not true but google is storing all this traffic to itself and therefore in a sense the oxygenating the entire World Wide Web and the stifling innovation and ultimately harming consumers because they are not getting access to the best information from across the internet. Host my sense would be that yelp would depend on google and many things. Guest its a codependency. When google started it had a dual pledge to consumers and it was a come to google and you will never use [inaudible] ever again. Webmasters it was listen, focus on cultivating great content and architecture sites these particular ways and you will be rewarded with an audience. It was this symbiotic bargain that google entered with these webmasters in the sense that google needed robust helpful content to exist on the internet so it could serve at relevant and of course, the trade was that google would then reward people that were good at cultivating helpful User Generated Content with audience. Wikipedia was another. Host before we go further, mr. Lowe, we want to bring leah and i listen conversation with politico. Thank you so much. Last week the Senate Judiciary committee had a hearing on health referencing which is the issue that youve been talking about where the Company Gives more benefits to its own products as opposed to third parties for how does google preference its own products . Guest it is worth taking a step back and think about how ubiquitous and importance of a product and tool google is for consumers in terms of helping them discover information across the internet. Today when a mom does a search for a pediatrician in st. Louis its most likely being done on a smart phone device, either her iphone or android device. 65 of all search goes through smart phones. Over half of the smart phone search has local intent so it includes a involves a consumer looking for a local business and so when she does the search for the 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 that page is a map with links to businesses but instead of those links going to Third Party Services it is stirring users into a secondary page on google. Com and that is problematic because what google collects in the information it serves up its a yelp want to be if you will, is objectively lower quality information for the average Character Counts are smaller, reading dissertations are skewed in such a way when there is a strong evidence that spam has run rampant and has misinformation problem because they are not investing in a commiserate level of human and algorithmic duration to ensure that people when they find information on google can trust that is a good predictor of the offline experience. That is not to say that Health Information but it turns out there is an entire ecosystem of thirdparty Services Like yelp, Health Grades that might offer more reviews, richer information for that query so why does google go to exclude the entire World Wide Web and candidate for relative revolts in that search and that is what i think that hearing was about. Could you talk about how has yelp been impacted by google . Guest sure. If we rewind the clock to 15 years ago and imagine what the experience was for consumer during a search and 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 this idea that google used to be a turnstile and use to defuse virtually 100 of its traffic through the World Wide Web. That pediatrician in st. Louis arch, 15, 16 years ago you can imagine 100 people doing that search and just for the sake of argument lets say that they are on average ten of them defused out to the web to the rulings on page one so each site on page one gets users for it today as a baseline seven out of ten of those clicks done on smart phones are going into googles products so that same one hunt of people, 70 had gone are just inside googles web has to [inaudible] that gives you an idea of the quantitative impact and of course the internet is bigger today so we have lots more searching and so technically some Services Like yelp have grown over time and thats a good thing but the truth is there are 2 million types of searches like this every day on planet earth, local searches, people looking for something as low stakes as a slice of pizza as an auto mechanic or pediatrician and instead of being matched with the best information across the web they are being steered unwittingly into this objectively lower quality product. You mentioned yelp has been pretty vocal about this all around the world and in particular in europe how has the eu responded to the concerns. Im glad you asked this question. Its important to remember that the European Commission took up these questions immediately after federal trade commission about seven years ago decided not to take action. I think one decides not to take action against the dominant antitrust investigation after you as the regulator had been persuaded that this big company in question is not going to be as big in a few years perhaps there will be more startup and so forth in that space. Its fair to say that the decision to abruptly close the fccs investigation into google in 2013 has not aged well. One of the reasons it has not clearly is that europe looked at the same evidence and took more time to carefully that the evidence and came to the opposite conclusion and ultimately issued a finding of guilt for these practices against google. Do you think the European Commission should interject [inaudible] its bit of a mixed bag. Im very thankful for the work of the European Commission on this and the leadership and frankly, i dont think that the socalled tech class would exist without investment without aprie was willing to square shoulders with one of these large companies. On the other hand the commission chose to take a narrow case this socalled Comparison Shopping vertical basically how we shop for Products Online and it was originally fired in 2010 and i would argue that they are effectively sending an amulet to the funeral and that industry has already been vanquished and 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 set the precedent but ultimately those markets have already tipped into a way they cannot be salvaged and so i am thankful for their enforcement action and im not sure i would have taken the same theory of harm. Host luther lowe, is it fair to say youre looking at google is more of a public utility that a private company . Guest i dont know if i would go that far but google has the right to innovate and the right to create. They won on their merits a general search and the page rank algorithm and the type of quality scores they developed in the late 90s clearly was a differentiated product and that is why everybody ultimately flocked to google. The problem is once you establish that dominance and this happened about a decade into googles existence they introduced and they were running originally organic search results and advertisements and i dont think thats controversial but it was when they began introducing the third category of the information, answer boxes but sometimes an answer box is not that controversial. There are four on the screen when someone types in two plus two and we can agree thats good for consumers in that factbased information and i didnt have to go to calculator. Com to enter that thing but if you are doing the search for the auto mechanic in madison, wisconsin why would you exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates relevant results so google can put this exclusionary box at the top of the page and that is what is happening today in the most common category of search a conservative estimate says over 40 of all google searches have this type of intent. So, im not sure it requires turning them into a public utility to fix that and i know some have tossed it up with certain aspects of the businesslike may maybe the google maps are factbased information and we are stuck in the world and its a fact and the clearly dominated that space as well and perhaps that could be an area to look at but we are not going to that. Host what is the Public Policy solution to the complaint that yelp has . Guest i think it is the same that we have tools in the United States to deal with abuse and dominance and its our antitrust policy. Sherman section two. Ironically in the late 90s with u. S. Versus microsoft which most antitrust historians will tell you today that the trial is the remedy so many may remember u. S. Versus microsoft as a stalemate between u. S. Government and this giant company that dragged on through 2006 that by enforcing the antitrust law the tendency of microsoft to scantily the landscape and asked themselves what new markets can we bulldoze into with our dominant operating systems and browsers they cannot do that as easily in the company that ironically benefited from that the most was google. Six months after u. S. Micro soft was filed google was born in a garage. Microsoft had 90 market share at the time on the internet. You can easily imagine the alternate universe where microsoft state looks like other users will go to this google Search Engine site and that where the action is on the internet. Why dont we read their original research papers, throw 50 million of research at the problem and steer people to our own Search Engine and they could have strangled google in the grip but that did not happen because you know, 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 market. Some Competition Advocates have raised questions about whether u. S. Antitrust law is capable of addressing some of these new variants so do you think u. S. Antitrust laws are robust enough or does it need to change . Guest i think that its a question we could often should we use the existing framework to deal with a company like google or do we need to pass new laws and my response is typically yes because i think that any tools we can bring to bear to give enforcers the power to address the difficult issues we are supportive of. That said, i think that there is a framework to use existing law to bring a u. S. First micro soft style case against google. I think unfortunately over the last couple of decades has been a culture of honor enforcement that we need to overcome and Congress Stepping in and even proposing these laws helps address that, that issue and that problem that our agencies, enforcement agencies are gun shy. The entire has shifted and people want some type of enforcement action against logitech companies and i think the u. S. Government has the tools to do it and there is no harm in bringing new tools to the table as well. I like to talk a couple other topics. He mentioned and everyone knows misinformation is a pretty serious problem on the web so how does yelp deal with questions about this information and fake reviews . Guest brilliant and important question and its been top of mind since day one. Our ceo was part of the socalled mafia, a group of early employees that peaked out in the late 90s and people forget about the history of paypal but in the early days the concept of sending money over the email over the internet via email was insane. They were besieged by fraud and everyday new assiduity and cyber criminal was defrauding more customers so they had they were losing 1 million standard product and everyone came out of experience with a view that what can go wrong will go wrong and we need to almost overcorrect on this problem and be aware of that when we go on to build new comedies that this has to be top of mind. Very early on in the yelp we saw what were obvious fake reviews and as such had developed and iterated upon a Software Recommendation system filter an algorithm, so to speak, that allowed everyone that looks at our 200 million plus reviews and examine things like the user ip address, activity and things that we are hoping to basically make an accurate production of the offline experience. It works and its pretty good but if you think about crummy business expense you had with no crosscheck on yelp i have 89, ten personal success rate in that anecdotal method and it is a good protector and its because we are willing to accept all positive that sometimes that glowing drive start review from mary will not make it onto your yelp page and that will irritate the Business Owner and is led to a lot of conspiracy theories frankly but its our willingness to air on the side of caution and ultimately better protect consumers offline experience that has made us so popular with consumers. Host on the flipside are consumers liable for negative reviews . Guest great question and an important question because in certain instances yes. If the consumer, god forbid, is using our platform to defame a business they should be held liable liable in a business is within its right to pursue that individual. On the other hand frankly, more often what we see is overly litigious businesses imagine a grad student writing a negative review, honest negative review about an experience with a shady dentist that they had and this dentist is then scanned and calls his lawyer buddy and says i want to get this review off the internet so can we write him a scary letter but its in the letter and most of the time the user will pull that information off the web and say i dont want enter into a lawsuit with this deeppocketed dentist. But the antidote to this frankly Public Policy problem for consumers is anti slap laws. Slapped stanford to teach a lawsuit against Public Participation and state like texas have strong ones so in the example im using the grad student can go to a defense attorney from a defense attorney can go seek an injunction against the dentist and get attorneys fees and find the dentist for that. Some states have no anti slap laws. At the federal level we have no anti slap laws so this is another issue that yelp works to ensure that the environment for online free speech is hospitable and again, we want to make sure that businesses have the right to sue individuals if, god for bid, there is defamation on the web but where we see a much more pronounced problem is people using the courts 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 that top of mind right now is the coronavirus pandemic which is changing about how americans are working and socializing. Its probably impacting a lot of the local distances that you have reviews on like restaurants and bars and gyms and things of that nature. How is yelp responding to the coronavirus . Guest im glad you asked this. Ive been at yelp for 12 years and its one of the most incredible and wrinkly, 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 and everyone is working remotely now and we are an Internet Company so you know, that is easier for most companies that have it but i think that it is something that will be have at least a multi month devastating impact on these small businesses. I hope that my emphasis in the last handful of days has shifted into how can yelp help advocate to congress that whatever relief package comes through, including meaningful relief for small Business Owners because they are getting hit the hardest. One of the things that congress and the Justice Department has looked at recently a section 230 of the munication decency act, a law that no one liability over user content so what are your views about section 230 and whether its been changed . Guest it might be an unpopular thing to say and washington these days but we are fans of section 230. We get asked about it a lot these days. My response often is would we be having this conversation about 230 if there were and if we lived in the alternate universe where facebook and google did not exist and answer across the board has been no. And so, i encourage individuals to think about other Public Policy tools that exist to address the negative externalities that come with vagueness 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 and allow more voices to arise and encourage competition between platforms it enables the market approach to deal with these issues and we are opposed to any type of radical reforms of 230. [inaudible] guest you can imagine a situation where the example i described earlier about the litigious Business Owner who feels like compelled to sue the individual, whether or rather not its a frivolous lawsuit they can now, absent 230, call yelp as a codefendant in the case. That creates an unscalable and insurmountable cost of doing business that would not allow Services Like yelp to exist. It is an axiomatic foundational necessity for the internet as we know what to exist and i just dont think and i think we should be exploring other Public Policy tools to grapple with facebook and google before putting 230 on the table. Host but doesnt yelp have some liability if a fraudulent business posts on your site . Guest well, we have a lot of mechanisms to ensure that at the end of the day the affirmation that we are providing to consumers is trustworthy and useful and there are mechanisms in place that we provide that to 30 allows us to provide that addresses this. The first is the Recommendation Software that are any given day is putting into not recommended a state of about 25 of reviews submitted to yelps lifetime so 15 million reviews that are in this not recommended state. Users can click on it but i can imagine its a spam folder on your email. The other tool we have is we have an army of human beings that are constantly looking at flags so a Business Owner, consumer and flag the review and say this violates guidelines and so a review like what you are describing would likely fall into that example and a human being evaluates that and says yeah, gosh, this does violate our guidelines so we will manually pull that off. I just dont think that bringing 230 into the conversation is a useful or productive way to develop Public Policy that will encourage a competitive and consumer from the internet. Host where is yelp based and how employees and are you a Public Company . Guest we are based in San Francisco and we have offices and a handful of cities across the u. S. Including washington dc. We have, i believe, about 6000 employees today and we are a publicly traded under the sign yelp. Host what were your revenues in 2019 . Guest you will have to [inaudible conversations] i will have to call my cfo. Im focused on my work in terms of educating policymakers and this is an answer to that i should note the answer to this question but off the top of my head this past quarter i do not know. Host how did you get to yelp . Guest i used to work and politics and originally from arkansas and i it was the year 07 and i was quietly rooting for obama. All of my mentors grew up in bill clintons shadow going up in arkansas said hillary has this in the bag and youve got to get on the hillary training now but i said im just going to take a sidestep from politics and as a result of google the internet, consumer web was exciting at the time so i put all my stuff in my car, drove to San Francisco, fought very low level gig at yelp off a craigslist gig in first place that hired me and about hundred of us at the time and i said this looks like a pretty Interesting Company so i would ride this out. Host luther lowe is now the Senior Vice President from Public Policy at yelp. Leah covers antitrust at politico. Thank you both for being on the committee caters back thank you. Thank you. Television has changed since he spam began 41 years ago but our mission continues. To provide unfiltered view of government. Already this year we brought you primary election coverage, president ial impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus but you can watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online or listen on the free cspan radio app and be part of the National Conversation through cspans daily washington journal programs or through our social media scene. Cspan graded by private industry, americas Cable Television company as a Public Service brought to you today for your television provider. Cspans washington journal live everyday with news and policy issues that impact you coming up tuesday morning. Watched cspans washington journal live at seven eastern on tuesday morning. Join the discussion. 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