Two examples of commercial censorship: the hotel fines visitors for negative reviews, and the restaurant wins in court

Toffler has a great metaphor in Revolutionary Wealth. Imagine a highway and cars moving along it. The leftmost lane, a speed of 100 miles per hour, this car symbolizes the most rapidly changing reality in America - business. In our case, it will be a network, Google and many social services. And the rightmost lane is a speed of 25 miles per hour. The government bureaucracy and classic types of business are moving along the extreme right. In other words, the state and the dense family business are simply not keeping pace with progress. Not so successful that they make decisions contrary to common sense and logic. And now two examples from the title

1. The American hotel fined users for negative reviews.

The owners of the Union Street Guest House in the New York Hudson district decided to penalize their guests for $ 500 for every negative review left on the Internet. Hoteliers returned money to tourists only in case of removal of unflattering reviews.

As Lenta writes :

“The hotel is popular as a venue for weddings. At the same time, the newlyweds were obliged to make a deposit from which the hotel owners threatened to deduct $ 500 for each negative review left by the bride and groom, their relatives or friends.
Previously, hotel staff were limited to only aggressive responses to negative reviews of guests: "This is complete nonsense," or "She invented it all."

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You can exclaim, it's illegal. Let them go to court and bend the hotel for a large sum. Ok, here's a second trial example:

2. In France, the blogger was fined for criticizing the restaurant.

A blogger went to a restaurant. In the restaurant, he did not like what he wrote on his blog under the heading "Place on Cap Ferrat, which should be avoided." Google indexed this review and began to display it in the 4th position on a search query with the name of the restaurant. The restaurant has dropped traffic.



What do you think the restaurant did? That's right, sued the blogger, because This entry is detrimental to the reputation of the restaurant. What did the court do? That's right, he fined the blogger 2,500 euros and forced to change the title. Does the note reflect the truth about the restaurant? The judge is not very interested.

Which of these we can conclude: alas, but no matter how our righteous anger, we are not protected, leaving negative feedback. Neither legally nor technologically protected. Information about us is publicly available and search engines in no way protect either us or our privacy. You can, of course, leave reviews anonymously, but this is akin to records on the fence.