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Webhost Sues Google
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'."
the whole expansion plans in TFA having nothing to do with the case as such....
AIT stores
AIT launched its first storefront Thursday in Chicago.
The Fayetteville Web hosting company plans to open one or two stores each month in 2006 as part of a $5 million campaign to expand the company.
Convenient both are occuring at the same time so it can be mentioned in the same article. Looks like a news story then turns into a press release.
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.
But suddendly, if money is involed, all this suit wearing managers start to say stuff like somebody has to do something. It seems to be true that they have been tricked. Even that it is indeed a problem of Google.
But only they can do a grep/sql statement on their little databases that stores all the cookie-ip-requests log data.
... again. The fraudulent clicks are not beeing made from a Google IP according to TFA:
Briggs said AIT is able to see where each of its advertising clicks are coming from, and in-house reports showing clicks from the same IP addresses indicate they are fraudulent.
Later on the guy seems not to see any IPs though:
"My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"
I'm sure with some serious tracking scripts any Adwords buyer should be able to monitor the IP addresses on a given keyword.
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...
"My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"
Well they do have a point.
Google has this data, why not make it available?
If i were an advertiser I would want to be able to to verify that the bills Google sends me are indeed correct. Right now it seems that advertisers have no way of doing that?
But I can see why Google is reluctant, providing this data incurs more costs, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of advertisers who are going to argue with them about their bills.
Not surprisingly, the article is light on technical details. I don't believe that a corporation such as Google would seemingly overlook a simple address filter containing IP ranges used by known legitimate crawling agents.
Maybe spam agents were indexing the AIT Web sites in an effort to aggregate data like published e-mail addresses. The article just doesn't tell us much. If that were the case, however, Google wouldn't have many options. They could add end-user validation to each advertisement (i.e., "Repeat the alphanumeric string so that we know you aren't a robot!"), which would obviously inconvenience the user and ultimately decrease traffic, or they could create ban filters. I would suppose that the latter option might also garner various legal accusations.
It sounds as though AIT could have incurred a legitimate loss, but are pursuing a large corporation whose employees aren't exactly known by most people for their negligent behavior. If my suspicions are true, however, how could Google engineers manage to prevent "click fraud" while balancing the usability of their service? Nobody wants to spend thirty seconds validating themselves as a human to an advertisement. Maybe AIT would have better luck pursuing the (hypothetical) spammers.
Do you like German cars?
Gee at maybe ~100 clicks/day for ~7 years I must have driven advertising revenue for the site to the tune of at least $500,000... I mean, even before the site had ads my obsessive compulsive hourly refresh rate drove the popularity of the site to where the guys made an OK buck the first time it sold.
So consider this post my invoice in the sum of $500,000. I'll take it out in credit at Think Geek, but not in subscription dollars... or, just knock off the dupes, hell, knock of the dupes and I'll subcribe.:)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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.
...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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Okay, $500,000 is a lot of money to me, but is it all that much to Google? Given that this is meant to be a class-action lawsuit against Google, I would expect a value a bit higher than this. I figure that if there's even a whiff of AIT being correct, a simple "settle out of court for a little less" might be an option here.
Perhaps the case just doesn't seem big enough to have the class-action label stuck to it...
Ask me about repetitive DNA
If these guys have the single IP in their logs, perhaps they be looking to see who it is and sue them instead of google.
- 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 :)
Well, let's see. The site is Fayetteville (NC) Online.
AIT is based in Fayetteville, NC. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that Fayetteville isn't a huge city, other than being the home of Fort Bragg. So...maybe the fact that a hometown company is spreading into major markets across the country (Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Raleigh and Charlotte) is something a bit notable that local residents might want to know about? I probably would if it were my town.
audioLibre - freedom of music
I've heard of competitors attempting to harm another by deploying some method of abuse against their advertising costs. This would not be dissimilar to exploiting a 1-800 phone number by attempting to inflict cost damages against the target.
The article doesn't indicate any belief that Google is directly responsible for the abuse they believe is occuring though it doesn't indicate that it believes otherwise either. However, I did not read where the possibility that competitors or other malicious parties are directly responsible for the act.
If they believe that Google should be responsible for not preventing an act, then I think it's a case that should be judged on whether or not Google should be responsible for filtering fraudulent calls to their site as channeled through Google advertising. To make the parallel to toll-free phone service once more, I am unfamiliar with any such protection offered by a phone service provider.
Should Google do their best to determine and filter against abusive "clicking"? Yes, if they want their advertising to be valued. Are they or have they been doing their best? That is a question for the courts to decide I suppose. But in my view, unless Google is being directly charged with responsibility for performing these clicks, then I think it will be a tough case to prove.
When Google invoices you for clicks, a share of this money is going to sites that are showing the ads. There are sites that fraudulently drive clicks in order to get more money.
When my firm used adwords, we saw our monthly fees from Google climbing steadily, from $10-20 per month to over $1000, but with no matching increase in traffic, and almost zero contacts via our web site (which was clearly aimed only at Belgian customers). We estimated that 95% of the clicks were fraudulent. We had no way of checking who was clicking on our site. So we cancelled the program and focussed on more traditional sales.
This is, IMO, one of the major skeletons lurking in Google's cupboard.
My blog
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?
"I will pay Google 1 cent for every click on my ad. Regardless the number of clicks."
If it were me, I would always have a maximum in place, and a method of verifying the correctness of a bill.
Besides, do Internet ads really work?
Well, the fallout from this was pretty severe. First, no one at google would speak to us. It was a black-hole. As soon as they determine you're defrauding them, you have no mechanism for appeal. After exhausting that path, we tried to sign up with other advertisers but discovered that there is a "black list" shared among the various web-advertisers and Google had placed us on it so none of the other advertising 'agencies' would speak to us.
At this point, we're still begging our users for money to pay for the bandwidth. There's about 6 years worth of email archives, plus scans of out-of-print manuals, hundreds of links to tech sites, and lots of invaluable information that our users value, but it's always the same 50 people who contribute monetarily... We occasionally try to sign up with ad companies but they still won't talk to us.
I used AIT for a while a couple of years ago.
THEY.ARE.SCUM.
They billing practices are blatantly fraudulent, sometimes charging you ridiculous "bandwidth charges" that exceed hundreds of dollars a month. Calls to billing never get answered, and neither is there an obvious way for one to close his/her account.
It took me over three months to have my account closed. My total on-hold time over those three months was over 8 hours. I left atleast 20 messages, out of which three got answered. I would call and leave messages, and eventually after a couple of days someone would call me back and give me a bunch of instructions on how to close my account (visit some obscure page, print document, sign, fax etc.), and then... nothing. I'd call back and after trying for days to get through to someone, they'd say they never received it, and I'd have to do it all over again.
Sometimes they would say they received it, and the account would be closed; and the next month, my credit-card would be billed again.
They have promised me to repay my money back, and I've seen nothing in over three years.
Not to my surprise, other people have been through similar situations with this provider, and some of their stories are pretty terrible. Read all about it here:
http://autsucks.com/
They even have ex-employees there talking about how bad they were treated.
AIT is very very bad. I colocated in their datacenter for about a year, paying $100/month for a verbal agreement of 100 GB bandwidth. There was absolutely no paper record of the 100 GB limit and not verbal record of what charges would apply if I went over. My paper contract with them had explicity voided out the section regarding charges for excessive bandwidth.
s .html
One month I received a bill for $6000 citing "excessive" bandwidth. I had used approximately 200 GB of bandwidth, about double my allotted. I called and they assured me it would be fixed. Then the next months bill was $10,000. Their billing system continued to try to draft my credit card.
I finally had to take them to court over the disputed charges. They "waived" the $16,000 right before we entered the courtroom. The eventual settlement came to around $600. These guys are crooks.
http://www.webhostingratings.com/plans/AIT-Review
"AIT is flat out terrible and possibly the worst service out there."
"I have horror stories about AIT on which I could dwell for hours, but let's just say that AIT's attitude no matter what happens is "punish the customer." They feel free to mess with your stuff whenever they feel like it, change your deal on a whim, and generally suck! Big-time weasels! We are planning a big crew party for after we blow them up; we'll call it "Operation AIT Freedom!"
"When I moved, AIT continued to bill me for "service" on an account that was closed. When I wouldn't pay, they ruined my credit. I could not even talk to credit manager about it. Bad guys!"
""Based on BBB files, this company has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to one or more unanswered complaints.""
"They've stolen $900 from me by disk over-usage and fraudulent billing practices."
"AIT systematically stole money from us for months."
These are all from different customers. This company has consistently and systematically screwed their customers.
I live in Fayetteville and have dealt with AIT for hosting stuff ever since they came into existence. The business was started by a ex-soldier (Clarence Briggs) and is now one of the world's largest web hosts as far as number of domains hosted. They are not just some "random" company as other people have said.
/. article) as of last week over advertising fraud. They claim that the newspaper is advertising a lot higher # of unique visitors to their wesbite than what they actually receive (they are hosted with AIT). It's interesting in that to me it seems AIT is revealing private information about a website they are hosting (not for much longer I bet!).
However, the point that the article linked is in our local newspapers online site is valid. Also, probably the reason that it talks about AIT's plans for expansion into storefronts is because Fayetteville has a vested interest in what is going on with AIT as they provide good high-tech, high-paying jobs for our area. People reading the newspaper (which the online article is a clone of what was in our newspaper), want to know what is going on with that company (which is smack in the middle of our attempt to revitalize our downtown area).
Another interesting tidbit is that AIT is also suing the newspaper (that was linked in the
So, basically, you all are getting a look into my town's petty politicking by one of the largest companies that is based out of here. Enjoy.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Google Web Accelerator is a proxy, so one would only expect a number of same IP's from AdWords, since the same people that would use Google Web Accelerator are the same people that would click on an AdWords link, especially for an ISP.
Yes, but what about NAT users. If my wife and I got to the same website at different times using the same ad, we are different people and different clicks. My home network has NAT setup and we each have our own computers. Small to mid sized companies often use NAT as well. Do you see the problem yet?
Also, did the company look at other information to verify they are the same hit? For example the browser in use, its version, the operating system and version, etc. There are other ways to identify unique hits. Granted someone could write a script to request a page 3 times with ie, firefox and opera but there isn't going to be a perfect system. This guy is asking google to LOOSE money on clicks that are valid from people behind NAT systems and the like.
Think about it this way. On my home network there are 7 computers. 3 run mac os x and contain 2-3 browsers each. (safari, firefox and maybe IE) Then i have 1 windows pc, 1 freebsd pc, 1 openbsd ibook, and a sparc. Further to complicate things i have linux on one of the osx boxes as well. Using the metrics i outlines above, i could hit the site with 6 different operating systems, at least 5 different browsers (counting firefox the same on each os), etc. Now that would cost the guy money. In the flip side, I could be throwing a party and letting my guests surf for some reason. Each hit would be unique in that case.
My solution for this problem is to use the metrics above and also give a discount (google's end) if the exact same request comes in. So if the useragent, os, etc come in around the same time (hour say) from the same ip, only count like 50 perecnt of the requests unique. This will make spiders and things count less, and if someone sends a link of an add around a small office with nat, it will cover that too.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Good high paying jobs? I worked there as an admin. On adverage the average admin salery was 28k
/. as good press, I am glad to see the customers coming to speak out tho.
The average tech pay was around 22k
They raise their "average" pay per employee by giving raises to the officers
As for number of domains hosted, they do not meet the number listed, just like in the early days they did not have an actual "OC-192", they just had the equivilant over multiple pipes.
You have to watch out for posts like this, at AITsucks.com the press boys at AIT like to come and anonymously say crap like this.
AIT has in the past decided to lock their current month to month customers in a 6 month reacurring contract, wanna know how they let them know? they barried it in a Christmas new letter, then wondered why after the first 6 months so many customers wanted to cancel and blamed it on everything but that. Something of that coincidence on that magnitude just does not happen.
Also as stated Fayetteville does have a vested interest in AIT, but what this poster failes to mention is all the times fayetteville has threatened to take the building away from AIT that they basicly gave them for failing to meet the conditions in which it was given.
AIT sees
When you cant win, ad hominem.
AIT suing Google for fraud is like the pot calling the kettle black. For a few years now, there's been a website run by a former AIT reseller that delves into the dark truth behind this McWebhost. AIT CEO Briggs is revealed to be a boastful drunkard who abuses his support staff, and AIT's infrastructure is revealed to be mostly obsolete, poor translations of better open source and proprietary packages. The full story can be found at AITSucks.com, I recommend budgeting quite a bit of time, get a cup of coffee, and prepare to be shocked and amused by the pervasive skullduggery of AIT.
Well considering AIT's bad reputation with web savvy people all over the country, I could see angry customers purposely clicking the pay-per-click link over the free link every time they search for "web hosting".
Also how do they treat their own employees? Their consistent 'evil doing' is coming back to kick themselves in the asses. They will not win this case. They likely just ruined what little chance they had of gaining new customers, unaware of their greedy unethicalness.
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.