Online reviews have an undeniable impact on the market and are an important source of consumer information. From a legal perspective, online reviews actively influence consumers’ decisions to enter into a contract. Moreover, online reviews convey pre-contractual information that consumers find relevant and easy to understand, unlike the pre-contractual information disclosed as a result of EU law–based information duties. From this perspective, online reviews could potentially be seen as a complement of the flawed EU law–based information paradigm and regulatory improvement options based on reviews could be explored. However, the unreliability of online reviews is an obstacle that haunts consumers, practitioners, regulators, and academics alike. This unreliability has previously been identified as a reason not to award online reviews a more significant role in the EU law–based regulatory framework of pre-contractual information in consumer contracts. This paper explores the merits of this argument by discussing how the unreliability of online reviews is currently regulated. This paper takes a broad perspective on regulation, focusing not only on EU consumer legislation, but also looking at standardization, soft law, self-regulation, and the role of national consumer authorities. Overall, this paper argues that there are sufficient measures in place to shift the debate from the unreliability of reviews to reviews’ potential role in the protection of consumer informational interests.
Most consumers consult online reviews before entering a contractual relation. Online reviews are written feedback or a rating left by consumers on a good or service they have experienced. Online review mechanisms are designed and controlled by online platforms. From a legal perspective, online reviews can be perceived as pre-contractual information: they tackle information asymmetries between businesses and consumers and they shape consumers’ contractual will. However, online reviews are often unreliable: they are not representative of all consumers’ opinions, they can be vitiated by biases or they can be faked in order to increase a business’ reputation. These issues can be detrimental to consumer protection, since online reviews can mislead consumers and hinder their trust in the market. Additionally, these issues raise questions regarding the recent role of online platforms as gateways to consumer information, their responsibility in assuring online review mechanisms’ reliability and how prepared European consumer legislation is for the platform economy. Even though the European legislator has not explicitly regulated online reviews so far, it has demonstrated interest in doing so, having had characterized unreliable online reviews as a threat to consumer protection. Furthermore, the regulation of contractual information has been one of the European Union’s main concerns in consumer law, which means that the existing regulatory framework can be applicable to online reviews. This article explores online reviews’ relevance for private law by determining to what extent existing European consumer Directives apply to them, focusing particularly the E-Commerce Directive and the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive.
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