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Webhost Sues Google

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the go-fishing-for-deep-pockets dept.

TheOcho writes "Webhost company AIT has decided to file a class action lawsuit against the internet giant Google. According to the article the dispute is over click fraud. AIT claims they have lost around $500,000 due to fraudulent clicks. They claim that Google is hitting their website from 'the same IP addresses'."

9 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. I don't get it by gnud · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Isn't this their own fault if they neglect to add a rel=nofollow? Besides, the advertising agreement ought to exclude known crawler IPs like google,yahoo etc.

  2. Right off the bat... by Cherita+Chen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I can already see a major problem that AIT will have in actually winning this case. What about traffic that has been proxied? At one point or another, most network/systems administrators, when reviewing their log files, have wondered why they are seeing so much traffic from the same IP address located in "Reston, VA". This is of course the location of America Online's proxy servers.

    Is it just me, or does their case seem a little weak?

    For more info on the AOL proxy phenomenon http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html

    --
    I'm not fat, just big boned...
    1. Re:Right off the bat... by jander · · Score: 5, Interesting
      A weak case has never stopped Clarence Briggs before. If you look up "Litigious Bastard" in the dictionary, you will find his name.

      I used to work for this Asshole when it was first started, and when I quit, I was served with an injunction preventing me to go to work for my new employer, two days after christmas. It didn't matter that NC is a right to work state, and that the company I was going to work for was a consulting company that had NOTHING to do with web hosting - He was just pissed that I had the audacity to leave my low-pay, high stress job for something better. And, from my observations while working there and from what I have heard from people afterwards; unless you leave the company on his terms and with his blessings, you can expect to get sued. BTW - even though the injunction was immediately thrown out when it was heard by a judge, It ended up costing me about 10 grand in lost pay, and legal fees

      Which was why, I assume, one of the first things he did when he went "corporate" was NOT to pay the people who got him that far any better, but instead directly hire a lawyer to his staff...

      It's my opinion that Clarence Briggs is the Darl McBride of the Web Hosting industry - in fact, when the whole SCO vs IBM litigation was started, I almost had to wonder if Darl wasn't being advised by CB.

      To tie this into the parent - It wouldn't occur to them that a large majority might be from proxies... You would have to be experienced enough/smart enough to infer this, And most people that I know who meet these requirements are also smart enough to stay away from AIT. Besides, when has the facts ever been relevant to people like Briggs and McBride

      I won't go into how his entire web hosting business is built off of free software...

      I wouldn't be suprised if he tried suing me again, just for posting this, - and yes, he has/had little butt warts who's only job (as far as I knew) was to google his name/troll newsgroups for bad press about him or AIT, then spread FUD/Sue/or attempt to discredit the poster.)


      btw, this is all my opinion and protected by the first amendment, so FOAD Briggs
      --
      An ounce of perception is worth a pound of obscure
    2. Re:Right off the bat... by ruhk · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Fuck me dead. Let me lend Jander some backup here. I was the NT admin at AIT when the stuff with Jander went down. It was ridiculous. Not long after, Clarence had me giving him access to people's Exchange accounts and breaking into their PCs so he could get at their files on the grounds they might "betray" him. That's the word Clarence used. Clarence went so far as to show up at one guy's (Ray, it was) WITH A SHERRIFF and demand access to the guy's home computer.

      The final straw for me was when he wanted every one of the *nix and NT administrators to provide financial disclosures not only on themselves, but their immediate family members as well. I got off relatively easily: I only had to pay clarence about $5300 to keep him off my back. A guy who left after me MOVED TO BAHRAIN to get away from Clarence.

      FOAD Briggs, indeed.

      Anyway, Jander, how things are going better for you and your family.

      --



      404 Error: .sig not found.
  3. Well this is interesting... by tsm_sf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quote from TFA:

    "It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it."

    And a quick search finds this page: http://advocate.soundtrax.net/ait-suit.asp, a class action against AIT for, and I double-quote, "Stealing People's Money".

    Hmm!

    Here is a press release from AIT. My favorite bit?

    "The real threat here is to the concept of paid search and ultimately to the entire Internet," said Briggs. "If people lose confidence in the commercial viability of the Internet it threatens the very idea of an emerging global, digital economy. Sooner or later, if something isn't done, the second Internet bubble will burst."

    You say "internet bubble-burst", I hear "cheap Ducatis and Aeron chairs on craigslist".

    --
    Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
  4. Something like this happened to me once by Giometrix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...Albiet on a much, much smaller scale. A bot (seemingly) made a huge amount of click-throughs within an hour (whether this was malicious or not, I have no clue), about 100x more click-throughs than normal. When I pointed this out to Google's customer support, I was shot back an email which in effect said, "We have safe-guards in place, those clicks are real." I was pretty bummed that the "do no evil" company would fire off an email like that, without at least investigating. Luckily, when I requested that they take a closer look, and that they compare what happened within that hour with my normal traffic, they agreed to investigate. In the end, I was never charged.

    Google DID the right thing for me; but I really was at the mercy of Google. I really can't see why a paying customer shouldn't be seeing exactly what he's being charged for.

    --
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  5. Waste of Taxpayers' Money... by Chaffar · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Probability that this is a waste of taxpayer's money:

    - The page has a a commercial for AIT Inc.'s "Voice, Training, and Data Services for the Office: + 20%.

    - The article about AIT suing Google is immediately followed by another one promoting AIT new storefront launch in Chicago. + 35%

    - Firefox says that 2 Pop-ups were blocked. I shudder to think of the content of these pop-ups: + 15 %.

    -"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it." OMG Somebody think of the children! : + 20 %.

    - The article is carried by The Fayetteville (NC) Observer. Any search on Google for AIT, Google, and lawsuit yield nothing: + 40%.

    - Interestingly, though, searching for the same keywords on Yahoo does yield a few hits. : - 10 %.

    Yep, this is definitely a publicity stunt by a random company trying to capitalize on Google's high profile. The numbers don't lie :)

  6. My experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I recently had a problem with Google as well. As an owner of a (very) small business, I had been running a small, focused ad campaign using Google's AdWords. One day while browsing through the daily charges on my AdWords account, I noticed a dramatic spike for just one day. Looking deeper, the spike consisted of clicks on just one of my target keywords.

    I looked at my website's logs for that day and found over 50 instances of a request for "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" from a single IP address. What made this even more suspicious was the fact that they were all made with "Wget/1.10", and that IP never requested any other page from my site, not even the image/CSS files used on the main page.

    I contacted Google's AdWord support, documenting all of the above in great detail and saying that these seem like fraudulent clicks. I got back a canned response "We're looking into it". Two weeks go by, nothing happens. I contact them again, asking for a progress update. I get back a response "Your case will be investigated within the next week". I wait 1.5 weeks, contact them again, ask what the hell is taking them so long.

    I get back another response, again promising swift resolution. Couple of days later, I get an email from an Indian employee of Google saying that they have not detected any fraudulent clicks. I ask for a breakdown of charges per IP address for the day to check their data, but they say they can not provide those.

    I tell them very well, I have no choice but to shut down all of my Google advertising.

    Personally, I wouldn't trust Google's AdWords at all. I'm sure it makes money for some advertisers, but expecting Google to side on the side of advertisers in disputes is overoptimistic. They lose money on that, and as the case is that all the evidence is in their possession, and they refuse to show it to outsiders, how the hell are you supposed to prove that clicks are fraudulent if Google disagrees with you, as they seem to do in even obvious cases?

  7. Re:They do have a point by XorNand · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why can't they track the referrals themselves? When creating Adwords, you input two URLs: one that's show in the bottom of the ad, and one that the clicker is actually sent to. You set the first parameter to http://www.fuzzybritchesbandit.com/ and the second to http://www.fuzzybritchesbandit.com?campaign=adword s. You then compare your HTTP logs against Google's clickthrough reports.

    This would ensure that you aren't getting charged for clicks where there are none. But there's also the possiblity that some sort of script *is* clicking just to drive your bill up. Now if this company has paid Google a half million dollars, they should have some pretty substantinal visitor data to mine. They should know what the typical visitor does once they arrive, e.g. the mean time spent on the site is 8.5 minutes, they're 76% likely to click on the features page first and then page second. Sooo... If they getting a bunch of clickthroughs from the same IP and the path/time through the site for each session is either a) identicial to the other sessions from that IP (a stupid bot that takes the same path everytime) or b) dramatically varies from the metrics of typical visitor (a semi-stupid bot that randomly traverses the site), then you know something is bunk.

    Like others have said, just saying "we have a lot of people from the same IP address" isn't good enough to pursue a claim of fraud. You'd think a webhost with a half-million dollar advertising budget would have the technicial staff who could tell them the same thing.

    --
    Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"