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Very cool update at the top of the article "NEW: As of May 14, 2020, New York City has passed a bill to ban the practice of third parties charging a fee for phone calls that don't end in a sale. You can read about that here." Glad to see reporting working successfully and highlighting abusive practices which then leads to changes in the law.
Could this be considered libel? ‘Publishing’ knowingly ‘wrong’ phone numbers associated with a business, would that cause damages?
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unfair-trade-practice.a...
I honestly don't understand why various state attorneys haven't taken this on. Not enough complaints?
If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to it. The Stowger exchange was the start of an era of "mechanical honesty" - machines, businesses, and even government departments that could only act in one way, because any bespoke deviation was too inefficient to exist/be profitable, and so ordinary citizens could rely on them.
We are coming to the end of that era. Computing power has reached the point where bespoke dishonesty and manipulation can be implemented efficiently. The public still retains the expectations of the mechanical honesty era, and is an easy mark. That has to change...
[edited for punctuation]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the fraud? The restaurant must have agreed to the commission Yelp is asking for if the restaurant owes it to Yelp.
Yelp, to restaurants: we get a commission on Grubhub orders. Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine ——— Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s] —— Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t a…
Is this true? Or is the agreement to pay commission or a fee for any calls coming from Yelp’s website or app?
I’m just saying people are throwing out terms like prison and fraud, and in the legal world, those words have specifics meanings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the fraud? The restaurant must have agreed to the commission Yelp is asking for if the restaurant owes it to Yelp.
Yelp, to restaurants: we get a commission on Grubhub orders. Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine ——— Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s] —— Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t a…
"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from fi…
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries t…
Menus, pictures of food, and honest reviews aren't helpful to you?
I think most people get a lot of value out of Yelp. Yelp's review system is among the hardest to game, so it has the most trustworthy reviews for service-based businesses.
That said, that's largely besides the point of this article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems obvious that a company could sue them for fraud by misrepresenting a phone number. I really don’t understand how or why this could be legal.
The problem is yelp has more money for lawyers than a low-margin local restaurant. That's why this should be treated as a criminal matter, with state prosecutors taking down Yelp.
"The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If [company x] is the starting place for all of the people...to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from fi…
I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries t…
So in one sense, the "value in Yelp" was in being successful enough to get Google to emulate their feature-set directly within the search results. Which doesn't really speak well to Yelp's continuing value, though.
I understand charging a fee to the customer who is making the choice to call, but if a restaurant simply answers the phone - how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?
In America, only the government is allowed to come up to you and say pay me this without you consenting. In all the businesses I’ve been involved with for over 2 decades, there are plenty of times someone sends an invoice for something you didn’t agree to, and you can always just ignore it.