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Yelp’s Luther Lowe on the ‘Seismic’ Antitrust Case Against Google
‘This is a reckoning of their own making’
OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
This week, Kantrowitz sits down with Yelp’s SVP public policy Luther Lowe in an “emergency” podcast to talk about the antitrust case against Google. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Google on Tuesday, alleging the company unlawfully maintained a monopoly in search and search advertising. The antitrust action was the most significant since the DOJ’s case against Microsoft, and is sure to send ripples through Silicon Valley — Facebook, Apple, and Amazon will be paying close attention since they might be next.
To talk about what all of this might mean, Yelp’s senior vice president of public policy Luther Lowe joined the Big Technology Podcast on extremely short notice. Lowe has been pushing the case against Google forward for years, and his on-the-ground perspective can help shed light on what’s at stake and what comes next.
Kantrowitz: Can you tell us a little bit about what happened today and where you expect it to go?
Lowe: Sure. I mean, I think it’s important to take a step back and just kind of take a deep breath and acknowledge what a seismic event this is. It really hearkens back to the last major antitrust investigation against a consumer technology company, Microsoft, over 20 years ago. And really, that was the biggest tech story in the last 20-plus years. In many ways, there are a lot of echoes of that in the complaint. U.S. v. Microsoft started relatively narrow, but it pointed to, in the theories of harm, broad issues and broad areas of concern, and if you read the complaint that the DOJ dropped this morning, you see that throughout.
And then the other thing that’s going on is the state attorneys general have their own parallel investigations, and they are bipartisan or…
