UPDATED 00:11 EDT / SEPTEMBER 13 2017

APPS

Google’s power is again under fire as Yelp seeks help from FTC

Review site Yelp Inc. is hoping the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will take action against Google Inc. regarding its accusation that the search engine giant is violating a 2013 agreement not to scrape images from Yelp or other websites in its own search results.

In a letter to FTC Chair Maureen Ohlhausen, Yelp said that an internal investigation revealed that in a period of just one hour it found that Google had taken photos from Yelp’s servers almost 386,000 times for listings in Google Maps. This, says Yelp, contravenes the former agreement that Google would not “scrape” its images.

Yelp said it then searched for 150 businesses from Google’s map listings and found that 111 of them had a Yelp image as a lead image in the search result.

“Google should be held accountable and subject to remedies sufficient to ensure its anti-competitive conduct does not continue to harm competition and consumers,” Yelp Vice President of Global Public Policy Luther Lowe wrote in the letter obtained by Business Insider.

In a statement, Google said that it was unaware that this was happening. “If they’d have raised this concern with us, we would have immediately taken steps to look at the issue and update these results; as we’re doing now,” Google said in response.

According to the letter Yelp sent to the FTC, that’s not good enough. “The scale of this image content scraping suggests this is not an unintended glitch, but a systematic contravention of Google’s commitments to the FTC,” the company said.

The complaint comes just after Google appealed a $2.9 billion fine from the European Commission for breaching antitrust rules. Although the EU seems to be getting tough on such monopolies, many critics feel the American government is not doing enough.

The issue became more sensitive late in August after an academic working at a Google-funded think tank was fired for applauding the EU fine, stating that it’s time for America to get tough on tech monopolies.

Images: Anthony Ryan via Flickr

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