Yelp claims Google is hurting consumers because often Yelp's results are better than what Google displays as their own Location results above.
Is it really hurting a user to have to scroll slightly down? Or if Yelp's results were really better would users not go directly there or use their apps as an alternative?
I find it very interesting you can claim Google has a monopoly on the web + mobile, which seems to be the necessary premise to make these claims.
That argument is quite compelling for search, where switching is easy and other search engines are going to give you fairly comparable results most of the time. But search isn't the only market Google is in. In the advertising market the "just switch" argument doesn't hold as much weight in my opinion: what good is switching to an advertising network that doesn't generate any views? If Google can dominate advertising and analytics due to their search monopoly, does any other advertising platform stand a chance?
Disclaimer: I've never been a Google customer, and I don't really know how much competition they have in the advertising market, so I don't know how much ability they have to jack up prices etc.
given how steeply traffic falls off as you get farther down a SERP (see, to name the first page I found searching for "serp clickthrough", http://www.pagetrafficbuzz.com/understanding-google-serp-cli...), it's hard to argue that (theoretically) practices which unjustly downrank non-Google properties would not constitute anticompetitive behavior when Google has a 65%+ share of search.
This is why theaters were not allowed to be owned by studios, Car Dealerships by actual Car companies, etc.
But let's say Google reserves the most prominent position on their SERP for hundreds of relevant queries for one-click pizza delivery. Maybe the majority of people will still click through to Goat Hill Pizza or whatever, with tastier, cheaper pizza. But Google's more prominent position gives them an advantage vs. their competitor, and that will lead to increased and probably significant market share.
Now this is the key: we users could decide that Google's promotion of bad pizza on their SERP means we should switch to Bing. But Google's search engine is, despite this one bad case, still far superior to Bing's. So according to standard micro-economic analysis, pretty much all of us stick with Google, so Google Pizza continues to get the boost.
In summary, in this hypothetical, Google is using the "excess" excellence of their search engine to increase market share of very different products. Since those products may be unusually profitable, they also have an increased ability to drive competitors out of the market. If unchecked, wealthy firms with one great product can use this technique to extend their monopoly into more and more fields. The end result is that more consumers end up with worse quality products and (over time) fewer options due to less competition.
(Note: I'm not arguing that this is truly happening in real life. I'm trying to explain how even a free product with monopolistic dominance can be used to take over other markets with inferior products.)
That said, I can't argue this article specifically because I didn't rtfa, and probably won't until much later if at all.
From that perspective, Google being the pre-eminent search provider (i.e, where the advertisers' customers search for a product or service) this becomes relevant.
Basically, yes, an advertiser could only advertise on Yahoo! (but in the process lose quite a chunk of their potential customer base).