Travis Luther Lowe (born 07/07/1982) is the Senior Vice President of Public Policy & Government Affairs at Yelp. He is also the husband of CBS White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang. ^[18]

Lowe is the son of Mary Hatfield Lowe and Robert M. Lowe Jr. of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

His mother is the director of the paralegal program at Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, Arkansas. His father retired as an art teacher from Van Buren High School in Van Buren, Arkansas.

Lowe graduated from the College of William & Mary with a bachelor's degree in Government. Lowe met his wife, CBS White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang, at the College of William & Mary in 2003, which she also graduated from.

A year after they met, while still remaining friends, they began co-hosting a weekly campus television show.

They became close friends, and Lowe was determined to someday become her boyfriend.

He finally succeeded in 2015, soon after a fortune teller at a New York City street fair had predicted they were destined to spend eternity together.^[16]

Lowe and Weijia Jiang got married on March 17, 2018, at Casa de Monte Vista, an events space in Palm Springs, California. Jim Obergefell was the deputy commissioner for the marriage in Riverside County, California. He incorporated a Chinese tea ceremony into the service.

Weijia announced that she was pregnant on Twitter on October 10, 2018. She gave birth to their daughter Frances Mei Jiang Lowe on December 24th, 2018. She was originally due in January. She weighed 7 lbs and 4 oz. and measured 21.5" at birth.^[14][19]

Previously, Lowe was an aide-de-camp to four-star retired NATO Supreme Allied General Commander Wesley Clark where he primarily assisted in producing General Clark's best-selling memoir.

He has served as a paid staffer on more than a dozen state, local, and federal democratic campaigns.

While attending college and serving as a member of the Virginia National Guard, he filed and won a federal lawsuit against the city of Williamsburg, Virginia for the systematic disenfranchisement of student voters. The high profile effort led to increased national awareness about student voter suppression.

Lowe joined Yelp in 2008 where he was part of a small landing team that opened Yelp's first remote office in New York City. After serving a year as the Director of Government Affairs, he built a department focused on business outreach and education for small business owners about the importance and utility of Yelp. ^[17]

Lowe became Vice President of Public Policy and Government Affairs in January 2011 and oversees public policy initiatives, including competition policy, consumer free speech and open data.^[15] He became a Senior VP in May 2018.^[21]

Vanity Fair named him on its inaugural "New Establishment" list and said of him "No single person in the United States has been a bigger antagonist of Google in the past seven years than Luther Lowe." Politico called Luther "Google's chief antagonist in the U.S. and Europe" this year when it reported on the Department of Justice's fresh investigation into Google's conduct.

He says his fight against Google is "heartbreaking" because he used to be a "huge Google fanboy," and it was Google that first inspired him to move to Silicon Valley and be a part of the tech industry. Lowe highlights that for searches related to where one lives, otherwise known as "local searches" (which make up 40% of all searches), the majority of traffic that lands on Google from such searches either terminates on Google or is sent to secondary pages for services Google offers.

Although not its initial purpose, Lowe says Google now "steers internet traffic to itself in a walled garden fashion" and that Google frequently uses low-quality information that doesn't give consumers the most accurate or helpful answer.

When a consumer is doing a low-stake search for something such as pizza, a mismatch based on Google's low-quality information might not be such a big deal, says Lowe. However, when someone is searching for a pediatrician for his or her child and they are mismatched, that's a big problem, he noted.

Lowe says the reason that Google's data is of poor quality when it comes to local searches and reviews is that it has a monopoly in the search business. Therefore, it doesn't have to think hard about accurately predicting people's offline experience the way Yelp does, Lowe said.

Google's content is "a dumpster fire," Lowe said, with its rating distribution skewed very close to five stars. That suggests that its reviews have been overrun with "five-star spam," Lowe said, which means businesses are more likely to write fake positive reviews about themselves and fake negative ones about their competitors.^[20]