For years, the user review site Yelp–where everyone gets to be a critic–has been under fire from restaurateurs who’ve claimed that the San Francisco-based site does undue harm to their businesses by allowing anyone and everyone to post reviews with no sort of screening process for the posters or reasonable system for restaurant chefs and owners to request corrections/deletions. Rival restaurants, nut-jobs, pissed off ex-employees–pretty much anyone with a wild hair can go on Yelp, say whatever they want and it will instantly appear for all the world to see.A year ago, our erstwhile sister paper, the East Bay Express did a story about Yelp’s sketchy pressure tactics–offering to bury or delete negative posts in exchange for “sponsorships” (basically, cash) which, to me, always seemed just one step shy of cartoony extortion. The only thing missing was the bag with the big dollar sign on it.And now today, John Birdsall at SF Weekly (another one of our relations), is reporting, via TechCrunch and elsewhere, that someone has finally decided to stand up to Yelp in court.The plaintiff in this case isn’t a restaurant, though, but a Southern California veterinary hospital that’s working with law firms in San Diego and Miami to file a class action suit against Yelp, claiming that “it asked Yelp to delete a negative review, was refused, and then allegedly received multiple queries by Yelp sales reps to cough up some $300 per month to make the bad review disappear,” according to Birdsall’s piece. This, of course, is pretty much the definition of extortion, just with a nice internet-age twist.Yelp, of course, is calling bullshit and vowing to fight the charges. The case is currently pending with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, and we here at Voracious will be keeping a careful eye on how it proceeds.