Yelp is a website and Popular Consumer applications it allows both connect with great local businesses. Its a service that empowers and protects consumers, allows people to discover great local gyms in a way for consumers to warn fellow consumers about not so great businesses. So how many visitors a month you have . Depending on how you want to break it out, this people who access it via mobile web, the website, be of the app, its north of the 100 Million People and we have over 200 million reviews that have been submitted. So so how do you make money . Yelp, not unlike Services Like google, Search Engines its a vertical Search Engine 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 to get study of business and patients coming through the door. google physically demoted non google results even if they contained information with Higher Quality scores than the information. What does that mean . Guest a yelp and google had a long and completed relationship and today one of the key things that i do in my role is educate policymakers, not just in the United States but in terms of the state attorney general and apartment justice but also the European Commission, antitrust authorities in australia and brazil and in turkey that a website that we once trusted and lied upon two mass consumers with the best information from 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 so it stays on google. Com and winds up going to some type of secondary page inside their walled garden. That was not always the case. If you rewind to 2004, 14, 16 years ago when google went public, the cofounder was coded as quotes are included in their s1 documents where they filed two ipo with the sec, he is quoted as saying at google we want to get you onto google and out onto the web as quickly as possible. In fact, thats the entire point. Today not only is that not true but google is stirring this traffic to itself and therefore, in a sense, the oxygenating the entire World 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 that a yelp would depend on google and many ways. Guest its a codependency. When google started it had a dual pledge to consumers and it was they come to google and will never use this ever again. Two webmasters it was listen, focus on cultivating great content and architecture site in these ways and we will you will be rewarded with an audience. It was this symbiotic bargain that google entered with all these webmasters in the sense that google needed robust helpful contact to exist on the internet so it could serve relevant results and of course, the trade was that google would then reward people that were good at cultivating helpful User Generated Content with an audience for example, one of those services wikipedia is another. Host before we go further we want to bring leah nilas into this conversation. She is with politico. Thank you so much. How are you . Great to see you. Based on the Judiciary Committee hearing last week which was sort of the issue that youve been talking about where a Company Gives more benefit to its own products as opposed to third parties. How does google preference products . Guest it is worth taking a step back and thinking about how ubiquitous and important 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 iphone or Android Device and 65 of all search goes through smart phones. Over half of smart phone search has local intent so it includes a consumer looking for a local business. 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 steering users into a secondary page on google. Com. That is problematic because what google collects in the information that it serves up and it yelp want to be if you will. Its objectively lower quality of information and the average Character Counts are smaller, the rating situations are skewed in such a way where there is a strong evidence that spam is running rampant and has misinformation problem because theyre not investing in commiserate level of human and algorithmic duration to ensure that people when they find information on google can trust that its a good predictor of the offline experience. That is not to say yelp information should be in there necessarily and it turns out theres an entire ecosystem of thirdparty Services Like yelp, Health Grades that might offer more reviews, richer information for that query. Why does google get to exclude the entire World Wide Web with candidates for relevant results in that search and that is what i think that hearing was about in terms of [inaudible] to talk about how has yelp been impacted. Guest sure. If we rewind the clock to 15 years ago and imagine what the experience was for consumers doing a search from google, you know, its hard to decouple the rise of what tim oreilly this term that tim oreilly popularized web 2. 0. It is this idea that google used to be a turnstile. It used to diffuse virtually 100 of its traffic to the World Wide Web. So, that pediatrician in st. Louis search, 15, 16 years ago you can imagine one of people during that search and just for the sake of argument lets say that they are, on average, ten diffused out to the lab to the tenant links on page one so each site on page one gets tenant users. Today as just a base line about seven out of ten of those on smart phones are going to googles products. That same hundred people 70 have gone or just inside googles well garden in the web has to contend and fight for those 30 remaining cliques. 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 low stakes as a slice of pizza to something thats 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 mentioned yelp has been pretty vocal about this all around the world and in particular in europe. How has the eu responded to some of the concerns you have . So 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. I think one decides not to take action against the dominant firm in a 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. I think it is fair to say that the decision to abruptly close the ftcs investigation into google in 2013 and that decision has not aged well. One of the reasons it has not clearly is that europe looked at the same set of evidence, took a little bit more time to carefully that the evidence and came to the opposite conclusion and ultimately issued a finding of guilt or these practices against google. To think that the European Commission to inject greater competition has been successful . Is a bit of a mixed bag. I think that im very thankful for the work of the European Commission on this and the leadership and frankly i dont think that the socalled tech flash would exist without knowing what exhibiting that she was willing to square shoulders with one of these large companies. On the other hand the commission shows to take a pretty narrow take. The socalled Comparison Shopping vertical basically how we shop for Products Online and as originally filed in 2010 and i would argue that they are effectively sending an ambulance to the funeral but that industry has already been vanquished and googles entrance into the market distorted it, created a weight Landing Strip for the bezos to come in and effectively conquer Online Shopping and it may result in helpful precedents but ultimately those markets have already tipped into the way that they cannot be salvaged and so i am thankful for their enforcement action and i am not sure i would have taken the same theory of harm. Host luther, is it fair to say youre looking at google is more of a public utility than a private company . I dont know if i would go that far. Google has the right to innovate and they have the right to create the product they want on the merits, general search in the page rank algorithm and the type of quality scores they have developed in the late 90s and clearly was a differentiated product and that is why everybody ultimately fought to google. The problem is when you were once you establish that dominance and this happened about a decade into googles existence they introduced where they were learning originally organic search results and advertisements and i dont think thats very controversial but it was when they began introducing the third category, answer boxes. Sometimes an answer box is not that controversial like the floor on the screen when its two plus two and i think we can all agree thats pretty good for consumers and i didnt have to go to calculator. Com to reenter that thing. But if you hard doing the search for the auto mechanic in madison, wisconsin why would you exclude the entire World Wide Web of candidates of 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 said over 40 of all google searches have this type of local intent. Im not sure that it requires turning them into a 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 clearly dominated that space as well and perhaps that could be an area to look at but we are not calling for that. Host what is the Public Policy solution to the complaint that you all have . About google. Guest i think it is the same that we have tools in the United States to deal with abuse of dominance and its antitrust laws. Its sherman section two and we saw this ironically in the late 90s with u. S. Versus micro soft which most antitrust historians will tell you today that the trial was the remedy so though many remain 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 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 they easily and ironically those that benefit was google. Six months after it was filed google was born in a garage and microsoft had 90 market share at this time on internet where you can very easily imagine the alternate universe where microsoft said hey, looks like users are going to the google Search Engine site and that is where the action is on the internet and why dont we read there original research papers, throw 15 million of research at the problem and steer people to our own Search Engine. You know, they could strangle google in the crib but that did not happen because i think the product managers and engineers at bikers off at the time were having to email lawyers to see if they could go to the water fountain let alone enter adjacent markets. There are some Competition Advocates have raised questions about whether u. S. Antitrust laws are capable of addressing some of these concerns paid to think the u. S. Antitrust laws are robust enough or does it need to change . I think that its a question we get asked 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 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. First microsoft style case against google. I think unfortunately over the last decades have been a culture of under enforcement that we need to overcome. I think Congress Stepping in and even proposing these laws helps address that issue and that problem of that our agencies are a bit gun shy. The entire shifted and people want some type of enforcement action against Large Tech 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 about a couple of topics. You mentioned and everyone knows misinformation is a pretty serious problem on the web so how does yelp deal with questions about misinformation . Guest really important question. Its been top of mind since day one and our ceo was part of the socalled [inaudible] mafia which was a group of early employees that paypal in the late 90s and people forget about the history and in the early days the concept of sending money over the internet via email was insane. They were getting besieged by fraud and every day new macedonian cyber criminal is defrauding more of the customers so they have a milliondollar data fraud and everybody came out of the experience with a view that what can go wrong will go wrong and we need to almost overcorrect on this problem and be aware that when we go on to build new companies that this has to be top of mind. Very early on and yelps assistance we saw while were obvious reviews and as such has developed and iterated upon a Software Recommendation system and a filter and algorithm so to speak that allowed that everything will they will fit our 200 million plus reviews and examine things like the user ip address and activity and things that where it is hoping to make basically an accurate prediction of the algorithmic experience but its pretty good if you think about a crummy business experience youve had and they will crosscheck it on yelp that we have a nine of ten personal success rate in that anecdotal method and it is a very good protector and i think its because we are willing to accept false positives. Sometimes that glowing fivestar review from your cousin mary will not make it onto your yelp page and that will irritate the Business Owner and is led to conspiracy theories frankly but it is our willingness to air on the side of caution and ultimately better predict consumers offline experience that has made us so popular with consumers. Host on the flipside, our consumers liable for negative reviews . Guest great question an important question because in certain instances yes if a consumer, government, uses the platform to defame a business then they should be held liable and a business is well within its rights to sue 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 maybe a shady dentist that they had and this dentist is thinskinned and calls his lawyer buddy and says hey i want to get this review off the internet and can we write a scary letter. They send the letter and most of the time the user will pull that information off the web and they will say i dont want to enter into a lawsuit with this deeppocketed dentist. The antidote to this frankly Public Policy problem for consumers is antislapp laws. Slap stands for strategic lawsuit against Public Participation states like texas have strong ones so in the example i am using a grad student can to a defense attorney in the defense attorney could go seek an injunction against the dentist and get attorneys fees and find the dentist for that. Some states have no antislapp laws and at the federal level we have no antislapp so this is another issue that they are working 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 forbid, 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 would be we believe wrong and we want to do what we can to advocate for laws which minimize that. One thing thats on top of mind is the coronavirus pandemic which is changing a lot about how americans are working and socializing and i think its probably impacting the local businesses that you guys have reviews on like restaurants and bars and gyms and things like that nature. How is guilt responding to the coronavirus . Guest im glad you asked this. Ive been at yelp for 12 years and its been the most incredible and frankly, terrible thing to witness in terms of what is happening to main street right now and i would argue yelp probably has one of the best if not the best data sets in terms of understanding the real time impact on main street that coronavirus is having. And so, you know, 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 have it. But i think that it is something that is going to be, you know, have a least a multi month devastating impact on these small businesses. I hope that my emphasis in the last handful of days for shifted into how can yelp help advocate to congress that whatever relief comes through includes meaningful relief work for small Business Owners because they are getting hit the hardest dispute. Congress and the garment of justice has looked at the 230 munications decency act and its a law that shows tech comedies from liability over user content so what are your views about section 230 and whether it needs to be changed . Guest and might be an unpopular thing to say end of washington these days but we are fans of section 230. We get asked about it a lot these days. I think my response often is would we be having this conversation about 230 if there were and if we lived in the alternate universe for facebook and google did not exist and answer acrosstheboard has been no. I encourage individuals to think about other Public Policy tools that exist to address the negative externalities that come with the abuse of dominance and 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 and enables a market approach to deal with those issues and we are opposed to these radical reforms. How [inaudible] how might that impacted if it was changed . Guest you can imagine a situation where that the example i discovered earlier about the litigious Business Owner who feels like compelled to sue individual that whether or whether or not its a frivolous lawsuit they can now, absent 230, call yelp as a codefendant in the case. That just creates an unscalable and insurmountable cost of doing business that would not allow Services Like yelp to exist. Its a absolute necessity for the internet as we know it to exist 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 take or we have a lot of mechanisms to ensure that at the end of the day the information that we are providing to consumers is trustworthy and useful and there are a lot of mechanisms in place that we provide that to 30 allows us to provide that address this pair the first is the Recommendation Software that on any given day is putting into a not recommended estate of about 25 of reviews submitted to yelps lifetime. 15 million reviews that are in not recommended statement users can click on it but i can imagine your spam folder on your email. The other tool we have is that we have an army of human beings that are constantly looking at flags so a Business Owner, consumer and flag of review and say this violates guidelines. The review like you are describing would likely fall into that example. A human being evaluate that and says josh, this does violate our guidelines and we will manually pull that off. I just dont think that bringing 230 into the conversation is a useful or productive way to develop policy that will encourage a competitive and consumer friendly internet. Host where is yelp based and are you a Public Company . Guest we are based in San Francisco. We have offices in a handful of cities across the u. S. , including washington dc. We have, i believe, 6000 employees today and we are a publicly traded under the sign yelp. Host what were your revenues in 2019 . Guest you know,. [inaudible conversations] will have to call my cfo and as that. Very focused 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 i do not know. Host how did you get to google . First yelp, sorry about that. Guest i used to work in politics and originally from arkansas and it was the year 07 and i was quietly rooting for obama. All of my mentors grew up in bill clintons shadow from growing up in arkansas said hillary had this in the back and you got to get under the hillary train and now. I said im just going to take a sidestep from politics and as a result of google the internet and the Consumer Internet so i put all my stuff in my car and drove to San Francisco and applied for a lowlevel gig at yelp off a credulous add and it was the first place that hired me and there was about 100 of us at the time and i said this is a pretty interesting company. Host from that humble beginning luther lowe is not the Senior Vice President for Public Policy at yelp. Leah nyla covers antitrust at politico. Thank you both for being on the communicators. Guest thank you. Thank you. Cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court in Public Policy events from the president ial primary to the impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online or listen on our free radio app and be a part of the National Conversation to see spans daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feeds. Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. And now and see spans to book tv more television for serious readers. And now book tvs monthly indepth program with bestselling novelist david baldacci. Mr. Baldacci is the author of over 40 books including absolute power, wish you well, and most recently, the fallen. You have been on tour for the last several weeks talking about your 36th book called, the fallen. It features fourline for a character by amos decker. If i were to meet amos decker on the street what would i say . You would see a large guy ambling down the street oblivious to everything going on and if you
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