It has barely been a couple of weeks when we last reported of WOT achieving a milestone with 2 million registered users and there is one more news already. The Web of Trust might have grabbed attention of all those users but it appears to be in hot waters right now.
Ten Web companies based in Florida, US appear to be concerned over WOT’s community warnings. We are aware that WOT enables its users to rate and mark websites that are unsafe for browsing, and this is exactly the reason which has forced these companies to sue the safe surfing tool. To them, WOT is doing everything wrong, defaming, violating rights, manipulating algorithms, etc. WOT has been asked to remove ratings and comments associated to the companies involved.
Why would they ask for such a thing? Especially given the fact that it is the user who rates the site and WOT is simply a tool that ensures people in its community are aware or informed of what others think about a particular site. I would have gladly sided with this lawsuit or complain had WOT taken charge of being the godfather on rating content or destinations online, but those ratings are all based on real user experiences. At least that’s what I know about WOT’s operations. Also if these companies are actually worried about being rated in any way, they must try and leave a better impact on users and have them rate them better. 31 million websites have been rated by the community of Web of Trust, suing WOT simply means you are suing each and every user in its community.
We aren’t getting into the details and will try to get some additional information from Vesa Perälä, the CEO of WOT in this regard. You can read the full release here to learn what companies have filed the lawsuit.
Update: Following is the list of companies who have filed the lawsuit:
- Career Network, Inc.
- Three Stars Media, Inc.
- Three Stars, Inc.
- d/b/a Threestars of Central Florida, Inc.
- Internetcompany, Inc.
- d/b/a Internet-Company of Central Florida, Inc.
- Medialogic, Inc.
- Power Applications, Inc.
- MonkeyJar, Inc.
- Buzzgrub, Inc.
