Top Google Executives Approved Illegal Drug Ads

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that the U.S. government used convicted con artist David Whitaker, owner of an online business selling steroids and human growth hormone to U.S. consumers, to help federal agents in a sting operation against Google when he began advertising with Google with advertisements that included the statement 'no prescription needed,' clearly violating U.S. laws. Google's settlement with the U.S. government for $500 million blamed AdWords sales by Canadian pharmacies, who allegedly were selling drugs to U.S. consumers. 'We banned the advertising of prescription drugs in the U.S. by Canadian pharmacies some time ago,' Google said then. 'However, it's obvious with hindsight that we shouldn't have allowed these ads on Google in the first place.' Peter Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting, claims that chief executive Larry Page had personal knowledge of the operation, as did Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who now is the chief operating officer for Facebook. In 2009 Google started requiring online pharmacy advertisers to be certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy's Verified Internet Pharmacy Practices Sites program and hired an outside company to detect pharmacy advertisers exploiting flaws in the Google's screening systems."

Comments

Illegal != Wrong

[tylersoze]

Yet another example highlighting the fact that "illegal" does not necessarily equate to "wrong".

Re:Why is this against the law?

[causality]

The same reason it's illegal to import DVDs from Africa to sell in the US. The drug companies find they can sell drugs in the US for a LOT more than they can almost anywhere else, so they do. Allowing imports from other countries would defeat that.

You see, when they say "globalism" and "global economy" what they mean is that corporations can off-shore to get the cheapest prices available for human labor.

When humans want to do things the other way around by making an "off-shore" international purchase to get the cheapest prices available for goods, that's a crime and suddenly the government wants to enforce a brand of protectionism.

It's standard hypocrisy.

Re:Sudden influx of Google is Evil Stories

[squiggleslash]

Well, maybe they are, maybe they're not, but of the three articles published in the last 24 hours by Slashdot:

1. One was an outright falsehood. (The claim Google is forcing all new sign-ups to create Google+ profiles.)
2. One was misleading, and arguably the truth was positive (spin was "Google is changing their ToS so that everyone has to share their details across all their websites!"), reality was "Google has always shared information across their websites, and the ToS is being standardized and hence made easier to understand.
3. And then there's this one, which appears to take a negative incident for Google (Google did, indeed, take ads from online pharmacies), and add some serious but unsubstantiated (and dubiously sourced) allegations to it (Billion-dollar-a-year Google's CEOs for some reason deciding, directly, to chase the million dollar market for online pharmacy ads. Does this one even make sense?)