Michael Fertik Weighs in on Yelp.com and Defamation for Lawyers USA

In the pre-Internet days, when people wanted to learn about a store, restaurant, hotel, or other business, they relied on professional reviews from the newspaper or word-of-mouth from friends or co-workers. Generally, this system worked for consumers as well as businesses. If a business provided a good service, it would eventually find a regular customer base and become a success.

On the other hand, the whole process took a lot of time. With the advent of the Internet,  however, information about new and exciting places could be found easily and, more importantly, instantly through websites like Yelp.com. Also, because the Internet is an inherently social technology, information about businesses could be shared among real customers in real time, allowing for a more complete and realistic portrait of a business.

Of course, the first two paragraphs function under the assumption that the Internet is a truly democratic “marketplace of ideas,” where the good guys always win and the bad guys always lose. Unfortunately, this assumption is far from the truth, a fact that nobody knows better than ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik.

Because of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, websites are not legally liable for libelous or defamatory information posted on their sites. In other words, even if a review is a blatant lie published purely to discredit a business, there is little that a business owner can do to rebut the charge. Furthermore, because of the high-ranking power of sites like Yelp in Internet search results, a bad review could dominate the top spots of Google for months, or even years.

In an article for Lawyers USA, Fertik further discusses this problem.

“The problem is this [Communications Decency Act] was passed way back in 1996 when all there was out there was AOL and Prodigy and it was easy to locate someone’s IP address,” said Michael Fertik, CEO for the Reputation Defender, an online privacy advocacy group. “Now anyone can make up a fake e-mail address and create a negative review of your business. ”

Such open forums could allow rival companies to post anonymously on Yelp and publicly bash the competition.

Posts like that are particularly damning, Fertik said, in the age of Google. The immense popularity of Yelp.com means a negative review of a small business without much of a web presence could end up being among the top results of a Google search of the business.

“There has to be some kind of legal recourse to raise an issue about that,” said Fertik. “Right now, our court system is set up for pre-Internet time and doesn’t protect the small business.”

Proactively claiming one’s online reputation is critical for businesses of all sizes in the internet era.

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