According to the latest report, on Monday evening local time, Google applied for a court order requesting Luther Lowe, one of the long-time critics of Google’s monopoly of the search market, to provide documents as part of its ongoing federal antitrust case (the US vs. Google).
The cause of this motion is the apparent breakdown of negotiations between Google and Lowe’s employer Yelp. Yelp has agreed to provide documents to some of its employees, but specifically resisted Lowe, which forced Google to ask the court to issue a subpoena, compulsorily requesting e-mail archives and other documents.
Yelp’s accusation against Google was conceived and advanced by Mr. Lowe and is a core part of the government case, the document reads. Right now, the government action advocated by Yelp in its communications is underway. Yelp cannot refuse Google to provide the documents it needs to defend itself. Like many documents in the antitrust case, this 51-page document contains a lot of Edit content.
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As vice president of public policy at Yelp, Lowe has long been an important voice in promoting antitrust actions against Google and even launched an email newsletter called Google Antitrust This Week” to track the search giant Action support. In a public statement, Lowe paid special attention to the search neutrality case against Google, alleging that the company used the power of Google search to syndicate and suppress subject directories such as Yelp.
This is not the first time Google has used antitrust procedures to force opponents to provide documents. In July of this year, the company pushed Microsoft to provide a large number of new documents because the company shared hundreds of thousands of documents with prosecutors before the case was submitted. Neither Google nor Lowe responded to requests for comment on the document.
