The grandparent was talking about the One Book To Rule Them All - Ma Bell's
"Ma Bell" hasn't been a thing since 1982 when AT&T volunteered to divest itself of its regional local telcos. AT&T retained ownership of YellowPages and they remained the dominant business directory but competition in the last decade has been fierce. It's so vast it even has its own association. And while you are correct about businesses getting a line for "free" it still required them to be an AT&T customer so it was a value ad for service not free.
The point of TFA is that a business owner shouldn't have to spend time and money policing multiple sites in order to protect himself from trolls and malicious mischief. Especially because so many of them manipulate the information presented so that bad reviews predominate - which they then charge the business to clear up.
That's not what I took away from TFA and anyone who did should not try and run a business as it is wishful thinking. In fact it is entirely the business owner's responsibility to ensure information about his business is accurate. If he is benefiting from positive or hurting from negative reviews he needs to be pro-active. There are unscrupulous businesses that berate competitors and post glowing reviews on their own business all over the place. You cannot expect you won't be a target at some point especially if you are successful because the better you are doing the bigger the target you are.
From a user's perspective - it's pretty much nothing but bad. Between the tendency of people to complain more than they congratulate, deliberate manipulation by website operators, and various forms of trolling and mischief... the 'net is virtually completely unreliable.
While all of this is going on it isn't as pervasive as you make it out. It is pervasive but it's not absolute like you make it out to be. And much of it can be spotted in a heartbeat if you know what you are looking at. I often see overly praising reviews of products or services and I completely discard these as they are clearly planted by the review-e. Same goes for over the top lambasting of a subject. If you take the objective posts and throw out the extremes you're left with a pretty good picture of what to expect.