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Google Bans Ads For Essay-Writing Services
llamapalooza writes "Google announced that it will ban essay writing firms from advertising on their site. (The prevalence of cheating on campuses has been discussed here before.) While universities have welcomed the move, the affected firms are claiming it will 'punish legitimate businesses.' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
Depends on the drug
Anyway, who really cares who Google accepts for advertising - its what they index that really matters.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Nope, I like my dictionaries to have the word 'fuck' in them, my phone books to list escort agencies, and my search engines to not set moral standards.
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
if I could have found those services.
"I'll create my own search engine, with blackjack and hookers" and essay writers.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution.
Essay writing is just a simpler form of prostitution. You know the old saying "Prose before Hos".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
> which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution." i had always wondered why google adds never advertised anything i wanted
First of all, I don't think selling papers is _illegal_, though. Unethical, yes, but then lots of unethical things pass for normal and legal business these days. (And it was even worse in the past.) So _if_ your implication is, basically, "they may be legitimate, but they're not legal", I'll have to disaggree there. They're against university rules, but AFAIK not against any state or federal laws. If they were illegal, you wouldn't need Google to do that, you could just forward those links to the police.
Second, legitimate is even trickier. Where do you draw the line? Technically speaking, anything legal _is_ a legitimate business. If you don't want it done, just pass a law to outlaw it.
And the business side pops up all the time (e.g, "but it creates employment!") when debating whether or not to make something illegal. It sure popped up in the spam and telemarketting debates, for example, all the way to the highest level. So basically when deciding whether it's legal or not, some MPs/congressmen/whatever-you-have, already considered the business side of it, and whether or not they want businesses doing that. E.g., whether the (lack of) ethics of it outweigh the employment created, tax income, and/or bribes from that lobby. In a way they already decided if that kind of business is legitimate or not.
Employment vs inflation is a constant concern since the Great Depression, when basically suddenly supply outstripped aggregate demand. (Yes, Say's Law does still apply, but "supply creates its own demand" only by lowering prices, and in the Great Depression suddenly the only point where you could actually sell all that stuff was below the production costs.) This became even worse when most industry moved offshore. Now we need even less people producing stuff. What do you do with the rest? Leave them unemployed, like in the 19'th century? Well, that also lowers the money they can spend to buy stuff, and that-a-way lies the downwards spiral that led to the Great Depression in the first place.
So nowadays governments actually get to see that employment stays roughly where they want it, and create some extra aggregate demand. (Deficit spending, pork barrel, social security, etc.) It works too, since we no longer have the economic crisis cycles that plagued most of the 19'th century and the first part of the 20'th century. Back then it was considered _normal_ that the industry goes through bankruptcy cycles and rises from the ashes based on demanding even longer work hours and lower salaries.
In a nutshell, a government's job is to see to it that you encourage (or at least don't discourage too much) people to create more jobs that don't actually produce something. Pretend to manage each other, create whole castes of marketters just trying to steal customers from each other, or do all sorts of convenience services to each other. And chip in a little to make it all keep working. Deserved or undeserved, ethical or unethical, as long as the negative impact is small enough, it doesn't matter. It matters that unemployment doesn't get out of hand. Because noone wants another Great Depression.
That's why even when debating something as annoying as telemarketting, the question just _has_ to pop up, basically, "how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?" You don't want to be the paladin in shiny armour that saved people from all evils... at the expense of causing the economy to collapse.
At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist. In fact, encouraged to exist.
If you think that such companies are crossing the line into outright harmful, well, just lobby your lawmakers to outlaw it.
But, yeah, I'll aggree that Google is free to choose the companies it does business with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The list of banned adds reflect what Google's AdSense clients, the people who put Google adds on their web pages, are willing to put up with. Many people would be unhappy to see adds for prostitution, guns or tobacco on their web pages, and choose another advertising partner if Google let those through. Losing those partners would hurt more than losing the advertisement customers for the listed products.
Now homework cheating services are on that list.
So this is a case where maximizing profit also happens to be "do no evil" (depending on your definition of evil).
To me it seems a little pointless to be banning advertising Essay writing services, especially when the google search is for "Essay writing services". Even without the paid ads, the search engine should still provide a list of businesses. Surely they are only taking a moral stance of not profiting from this kind of service rather than really inhibiting people.
Cheers, Chris
"Who bothers to sell essays and dissertations when half the spam I get offers me a PhD outright for $200!"
Phd, pffft - I have the Nigerian finance minister transfering $34M dollars into my account as we speak!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.