As the article says, "Customers have the right to their opinions without being harassed and intimidated," but what about people who are not customers? How can a user of Yelp know whether or not the review is legitimate and not a competitor or disgruntled employee? And how can we know that the positive reviews weren't posted by the owner or his friends and family? Or paid shills?
All of those non-customer reviews skew the opinions that we (partially) base our decisions on.
So there have to be some checks to the anonymity. I think the barrier of going to court is among the most reasonable ones we have right now.
Yelp doesn't know if a review is truly legitimate or not but they employ algorithms to detect potentially fake reviews and the ones they flag as potentially fake are not factored into the score and hidden at the bottom of the reviews panel. Common triggers include brand new accounts with a single review and no other activity (friends, check-ins, etc.).
In the hotel industry, Tripadvisor has had to deal with the same issue with fraudulent reviews so other competitors have tried to enter the space with the concept of "verified reviews" only from folks who they know have stayed at the hotel. This is similar to Amazon's verified reviews since they tie back to purchase history.
I agree that 'verifying' the reviewer is a great idea. How would you do that? Amazon knows whether or not the reviewer bought the item; the Amazon ecosystem is somewhat closed.
How do those Tripadvisor competitors know who has really stayed in the hotel? How could Yelp do that without drying up the pool of reviewers too much?
I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to verify a bad review... they hated the experience enough to write about it, I can't imagine scanning a copy of a receipt would be too much additional effort.
All of those non-customer reviews skew the opinions that we (partially) base our decisions on.
So there have to be some checks to the anonymity. I think the barrier of going to court is among the most reasonable ones we have right now.