The editorial board of Bloomberg has this piece today, in the wake of news reports about Amazon suing fake reviewers:
…. Can Amazon succeed in weeding out all fake reviews? In a word: No. But it has rightly judged them to be a threat to the trust on which much e-commerce depends. Whether the legal system offers the best way to maintain that trust remains an open question.
At any rate, the case for cracking down on fake reviewers highlights a distinction with a difference in the digital age: Privacy and anonymity are not the same, and they do not deserve equal treatment. The former is a right that consumers should expect and companies should honor. The latter, with some notable exceptions, too often masks activities that don’t deserve protection and which distort competition.
Read more on Bloomberg. I’ve asked them to provide a direct link to these “notable exceptions” that they recognize.