Yelp is being sued because it's an easy target for angry business owners, not because they did anything wrong. (If they didn't exist, they wouldn't push any traffic to the restaurant. The problem is that they do exist and that users trust them.)
This is about being forced to pay to keep your good reviews, not about page views. The company is just saying that with a reduced rating they saw less traffic, which is to be expected.
It's unethical, certainly, but the action you take against unethical journalists or their publications is to stop reading them. The legal system does not provide a remedy.
Welcome to civil court.
2. Legal definition of extortion (IANAL): The use, or the express or implicit threat of the use, of violence or other criminal means to cause harm to person, reputation, or property as a means to obtain property from someone else with his consent.
Seems like (to my untrained and uneducated self) that this would be Yelp damaging the Company's reputation because the Company refused to pay Yelp.
Where Yelp has allegedly crossed a line is in manipulating the user-generated reviews of a site according to whether they pay for advertising, while claiming that no manual intervention is happening.
The truth is likely more murky than either party's depiction, of course; I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that their "automated filter" does take the "ad partner" status of a business into account when deciding how many reviews to flag for moderation or removal.
Of course, you're right to suggest that at a certain level, Yelp can do whatever they want. They just shouldn't misrepresent what you're buying with your ad dollars.
Let me illustrate in what scenario they would be the same. Say I'm #1 for a Google Search. A Google sales rep then contacts me and says that for $300 a month, I can maintain that position. But I have great SEO and don't need to pay Google anything. After I decline to pay, Google's ranking algorithm destroys my pagerank and I am now on page 5 of search results.
That doesn't seem right.
Anecdotal evidence continues to emerge that Yelp's black-box filters against 'suspicious' reviews have a strictness dial controlled by ad payments.
I used to delete comments from my blog all the time, and now I don't allow them at all. If I had advertising, would I be violating some rule?
Then how is Yelp any different, except that people blindly trust it?
But traditional journalism and review outlets keep a clear separation between advertising and editorial decisions.
Similarly, in finance, a 'Chinese wall' prevents information and revenue from some clients from influencing investment recommendations.
And on the internet, Google got more respect than Go/Overture and other competitors by clearly marking advertising, and committing in no uncertain terms to the principle that 'organic' results were uninfluenced by ad-spending.
If Yelp wants to blaze a new trail, where review placements and ratings are for sale, I'm sure they can legally do so -- but then Yelp needs to make the proper disclosures, and take the reputational hit that entails. Otherwise they're deceiving people -- which invites lawsuits for unfair trade practices and the attention of regulatory agencies like the FTC.
(Facebook is likely to face the same disclosure issues if they ever let companies pay to highlight or bury comments on 'Fan' pages.)