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The Petition to Dissolve Yelp Inc.

An employee carries a box out of a glass office building while a crowd of small-business owners applauds.
An ending to Yelp, done properly. The only thing Yelp will ever deserve five stars for.

Every day, millions of people go looking for something. A business, a service, a restaurant, an answer. Along the way, they encounter pages from Yelp. They did not ask for those pages. They did not go looking for Yelp. Yet there they are, appearing again and again in search results, standing between people and the businesses they are actually trying to find.

This is what Yelp has become: trash on the side of the road. An eyesore. Something nobody asked to have put there, nobody wants to see, and nobody can make disappear. The internet does not clean up after itself.

Those pages did not simply blow in. Yelp put them there and continues to maintain them, creating pages for millions of businesses that never asked for one. And the cost is paid twice. People pay with their time as they scroll past another layer of search results they never wanted. Businesses pay by having their names and reputations tied to a platform they never chose.

Meanwhile, the internet moved on. People have better ways to discover local businesses, research their options, read customer reviews, go directly to business websites, and get the information they need. Businesses have better ways to establish an online presence and reach customers directly. The problem Yelp was built to solve has largely been solved by the internet itself.

Yet Yelp remains, consuming money, people, infrastructure, and attention in order to preserve a middleman that is no longer necessary. All of those resources could be used to build something useful. Instead, they are spent keeping an obsolete business alive and preserving what has become little more than permanent clutter on the side of the road.

That is not a service. It is a cost humanity no longer needs to bear.

This petition asks the Board of Directors of Yelp Inc. to do the one thing that remains: end the company, in an orderly and lawful manner, under the laws of the state that chartered it.

The petition follows.

Sign the Petition on Change.org
Petition to Dissolve Yelp Inc. official seal

Petition for the Orderly Dissolution of Yelp Inc.

To: The Board of Directors of Yelp Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered at 350 Mission Street, 10th Floor, San Francisco, California 94105
From: The undersigned
Re: Petition for the voluntary dissolution of Yelp Inc. pursuant to 8 Del. C. § 275

We, the undersigned, respectfully petition the Board of Directors of Yelp Inc. to adopt a plan for the complete and orderly voluntary dissolution of the corporation, in the manner provided by Delaware law.

I. Recitals

WHEREAS Yelp Inc. is a corporation duly organized under the laws of the State of Delaware; and

WHEREAS Section 275 of the Delaware General Corporation Law permits the board of directors of a corporation to adopt a resolution approving its dissolution, to submit that resolution to the stockholders, and, upon approval, to cause a certificate of dissolution to be filed with the Secretary of State of the State of Delaware; and

NOW, THEREFORE, the undersigned respectfully petition the Board of Directors of Yelp Inc. as follows:

II. Request

  1. That the Board adopt a resolution that the dissolution of the corporation is advisable, pursuant to 8 Del. C. § 275(a);
  2. That the Board submit the resolution to the stockholders for approval pursuant to § 275(b), and, upon such approval, cause a certificate of dissolution to be filed with the Secretary of State of the State of Delaware pursuant to § 275(d);
  3. That, in carrying out the dissolution, Yelp sell or otherwise dispose of its assets as permitted by 8 Del. C. § 271;
  4. That Yelp provide for the notice and payment of claims as provided by 8 Del. C. § 280, and satisfy remaining claims in the manner provided by § 281;
  5. That Yelp wind down its affairs and complete its dissolution within the period provided by 8 Del. C. § 278.

III. The Data Sunset

As a condition of dissolution, and prior to the withdrawal of any listing from public access, Yelp shall offer each listed business, free of charge and in a machine-readable format, a complete export of all data associated with that business's listing — including reviews, photographs, hours, and business responses — for such use as the business chooses.

Thereafter, the review corpus and business listings shall be retired from public access and preserved solely as archived records, and shall not be transferred to any successor as a living platform, whether by sale, license, or gift.

IV. Closing

The undersigned ask nothing of the Board that the law does not already permit it to do.

Respectfully submitted.

The undersigned petition the Board of Directors of Yelp Inc. for the complete and orderly voluntary dissolution of the corporation, pursuant to 8 Del. C. § 275, on the terms set forth above.

Sign the Petition on Change.org
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