Will Yelp's new court ruling change the way we look at online reviews?

 

On September 2rd, 2014, the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals dismissed several class-action lawsuits filed against Yelp, Inc. by small businesses claiming that the online review site manipulated their reviews in an effort to boost advertising dollars.  Source: Forbes

As a former Yelp employee, I remember experiencing the influx of these allegations during my 3 year tenure. For the record, as someone who worked on the sales side, there is no truth to the accusations that Yelp could or would add or remove reviews in exchange for advertising or to punish non-advertisers. Coming from someone who has had thousands of conversations with local business owners, many of whom would direct their anger over their negative towards me, I can say with certainty that no matter what they said to me, or how much they offered to pay, I could not do a single thing about their reviews.

Therefore, the final verdict was not at all surprising to me, and actually felt a little bit vindicating that a company, who to their employees always stressed the value of authenticity and trust, was able to rise above the on-going efforts to damage their reputation.

However, one surprising element to the ruling was that if Yelp actually did use reviews as leverage to gain ad dollars, it wouldn't actually be illegal. According to Judge Marsha Berzon, "As Yelp has the right to charge for legitimate advertising services, the (alleged) threat of economic harm ... is, at most, hard bargaining" Source: SFGate

Will this change the way that the online community looks at Yelp reviews, or any other online reviews for that matter? Yelp claims that it never will use this tactic, but it, along with other publicly-traded, for-profit companies are inevitably under pressure from shareholders to boost profits. I imagine any sort of "moral contract" against using these methods could break down if any of the big players goes down that path (like a Yelp or Amazon). If manipulating online reviews becomes more widely used, how will the 80%+ of consumers who use those reviews to make purchase decisions change their behavior? Will online reviews just become another form of native advertising?