“I came from Italy, and know exactly what mafia extortion looks like,” he says. “Yelp was manipulating reviews and hoping I would pay a protection fee. I didn’t come to America and work for 25 years to be extorted by some idiot in Silicon Valley.”
the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that Yelp had the right to manipulate reviews, and its advertising tactics were a form of “hard bargaining” — not extortion.