Yelp, to restaurants: we get a commission on Grubhub orders.
Restaurants, begrudgingly: fine
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Yelp, to users: click here to order through Grubhub
Yelp, to customers: or just use the restaurant’s phone number to order yourself. [shows you a number that isn’t the restaurant’s]
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Yelp is effectively telling users that a number belongs to the restaurant when it doesn’t. I’m sure yelp’s lawyers would say they aren’t actually telling any users that the restaurant’s number belongs to the restaurant, but come on. It’s clear that the intent is to mislead.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's pretty obvious that Yelp wouldn't do this if their contracts didn't cover it. The question is whether the contracts and sales language being used are worded to mislead the restaurant owner. I see no reference to contract language or sales language anywhere in the article or this thread.
> It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal?
No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.
In many cases they can and will if they either feel that the risks are worthwhile (in particular cases where the penalties are far exceeded the potential boon), or if they think they have some sort of edge case loophole that they can throw money at to get through. These are carefully calculated risks planned out by experienced teams of lawyers though.
Something like this though was almost certainly not one of those gambles.
Given yelp's reputation for having a toxic extortionist corporate culture, I think it's naive to assume anything is beyond them. If you told me yelp flat out had somebody murdered, I wouldn't dismiss even that out of hand. Not after what I've heard about their corporate culture, and not after hearing what eBay executives thought they could get away with.
