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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

There was an easy solution for Yelp: opt out of Google search results.

What Yelp wants, is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to benefit from what Google offers, and they want Google to behave exactly as they would prefer, assuming control over Google's product through government power. Classic competitor hypocrisy, the same behavior displayed 15 years ago by Microsoft's extremely envious competition. They didn't want to beat Microsoft in consumer operating systems, they wanted to chain and control Microsoft's operating system to their benefit.

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If search results that hit Yelp data linked to Yelp there'd be no problem. However if it links to Google Places because Google scraped the Yelp data and loaded it into the Places database - that's a problem.

Suppose someone launched an 'Encyclopedia Search' service that searched Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britanica, etc and linked to their sites. The the service then started loading the Wikipedia and Britanica content into it's own respository and linked searches to that. It's still searching the same data, and taking you to the same articles, it's just that now you're not going to Wikipedia or Britanica anymore. Would that be ok? If not, what's the difference?

I thought Wikipedia's license specifically allowed that (presumably Britannica's does not)?

Poor analogy. Yelp contains facts and user reviews. Encyclopedias contain facts conveyed through written articles. The writing and reviews may be copyright protected. Facts are not.

Curated collections of facts are absolutely protected by copyright, provided they meet certain criteria. For example you can use that data to create a new curated data set for a different purpose, but you can't just copy all the data and use it in the way it was orriginaly compiled for because that's copying the curation. I can't say authoritatively if Yelp's data is likely to meet these criteria, but we're not talking about copyright violation anyway, we're talking about anti-competitive practices.

Using a dominance in search to scrape data from competitors for use in other services and then link to them from search in preference over the data's source may well be anti-competitive, even if the scraping itself isn't illegal.

> What Yelp wants, is to have their cake and eat it too.

That would be true if Google didn't have an effective monopoly in search. Because it is an effective monopoly, saying that about Yelp is like saying a citizen that is against any form of socialism but cashes social security checks wants to have his cake and eat too. False. That citizen would prefer that social security doesn't exist, but given that it does, and given that he is forced to pay the costs, isn't going to be stupid and refuse the checks. And I say that as a free-market socialist.

There are two ways to deal with a monopoly:

- break it up

- allow it to continue, but force it to provide equal access, at non-monopolistic rates and terms

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