I've worked for a Yelp-lookalike website in an Eastern European country, sometime in 2010. The whole thing cost my employer a lot of money to get started, think programmers' and sales people's salaries, to say nothing of the people that we had actually outside the office, walking the streets of our ten-or-so biggest cities and trying to document each and every local business.

And then, towards the end of 2010-early 2011, Google decided to enter the game with its Google Places. They had no people on the ground to collect businesses' addresses and make sure that the advertised phone numbers were actually correct. But, surprise, surprise, in a matter of less than 6 months all of this data was on Google Places. At the time I was actually telling my boss: "hey! at some point the EU is bound to do something! They cannot just rip people off like this". It "only" took the EU ~6years.