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Nasir and Matt welcome Alec Farwell of RevLeap to discuss why his company is being sued by Yelp and how you can support their cause. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: And we’re covering, I think – what is this? I don’t know if it’s our favorite topic or second favorite. I think we go back and forth between Uber and Yelp. But we’re covering Yelp today. MATT: Well, yeah, I was going to say it’s been a long time coming. You’ve been harping on this issue for what’s seemed like years and years, but I think it’s only been maybe one year at most. NASIR: Yeah, I think, on the podcast, for a year. But, I think, otherwise, it’s been definitely years, for sure. MATT: It’s been a while since we’ve had a guest, too. I think this is going to be a pretty good guest to have because it’s a very interesting topic and a very interesting thing that they’re doing. So, we have Alec here with Revleap. For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, they’ve recently been involved with a lawsuit with Yelp. The difference here is they’re actually being sued by Yelp. I know, a lot of times, we talk about people wanting to sue Yelp. This is the flip side of it. So, Alec, it’s good to have you here. ALEC: Yeah, thank you. NASIR: So, as we know, just to kind of set this up a little bit, Yelp is a company that has plenty of reviews for small businesses and, as we’ve discussed in the past, once you have a bad review, it’s very difficult, and that’s actually published and actually part of the algorithm that they actually choose to publish, it’s very difficult to remove that review unless you can actually, if it’s a statement of defamation and you actually know the identity of the actual reviewer. Other than that, the Ninth Circuit ruled – I think it was, like, last year or so – that, even if Yelp is changing the algorithms and they’re fancy however they want to do it, even if they are extorting and basically taking in money from advertisers and putting those positive reviews up and those that don’t advertise, putting the negative reviews up, and vice versa, that’s okay. It was kind of a very controversial decision and I don’t think it was made in the way that necessarily Ninth Circuit intended to do. But that kind of ruling, I think, gave a little bit of strength or aggressiveness for Yelp to start going after other companies that actually service customers and service businesses that want to have a little bit more control of their reputation online. So, I may be mischaracterizing exactly what you do, Alec, so I don’t want to be the one to do that. Do you want to describe exactly how you service your customers and what you’re doing? Also, touch on what Yelp is saying about you guys. ALEC: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to first, you know, re-verify all the stuff that you’ve just said and I wanted to bring that up as well because, you know – and, keep in mind, this is all my speculation; I’m not entirely sure, you know, I’m not an attorney, you know, that’s your field but, you know – from what I can see, Yelp, right now, is trying to get the backing of our legal system to further establish control and dominance over everyone’s profile. You know, this win that they just had, this victory, this victory allowed them, essentially, they can do whatever they want. So, they can literally go up to someone and say, “Hey! You know, if you don’t pay us, we’re going to remove your good reviews,” and they can legally do that now, and correct me if I’m wrong, but that was my understanding of it. So, they have the legal leeway now to do whatever they want on people’s profile. With this lawsuit, my thinking is that now they’re trying to get the legal backing to not only be able to do whatever they want to someone’s profile once they reviews are there, but they’re trying to prevent business owners from even having t...