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Supreme Court Rejects Google Appeal In Class Action Dispute From Advertisers (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via NBC News: The Supreme Court on Monday has rejected Google's appeal in a class action lawsuit involving claims that the company deceived California advertisers about the placement of internet ads via its Adwords service. NBC News reports: "The court's decision not to hear the case leaves in place a September 2015 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the litigation could move forward as a class action representing advertisers who use the service between 2004 and 2008. The 2008 lawsuit accused Google of violating California fair advertising laws because it misled advertisers about where the ads would be placed. The Adwords service was primarily aimed at placing ads next to relevant Google internet search results. But the plaintiffs said Google should have disclosed that ads would also appear in undesirable places such as error pages and undeveloped websites known as parked domains." Google has made an effort to clean up some of its ads. In February, the company announced it would be ditching sidebar ads. Most recently, Google announced in early May that it would ban payday loans and some related products from its ads systems.
There!
If there were a good way to auto-detect a parked domain, Google should not be selling ad space there.
Then again, if there were a way that worked, we could order done what should be done -- that is, force unregistering of parked domains.
This judge is activist from bench and should be dis-bar and placed in peach.
I don't really care what shady companies want to advertise shady products. What I do care about is the security of the delivery method. The advert publishing mechanisms are probably the worst offenders at spreading malware and viruses on the web. Google: if you're going to put more effort in to something then please put more effort in to securing this
"The Adwords service was primarily aimed at placing ads next to relevant Google internet search results. But the plaintiffs said Google should have disclosed that ads would also appear in undesirable places such as error pages and undeveloped websites known as parked domains."
When you sign up for adwords, you can choose if you want your ads to appear in (1) search results and/or (2) the google content system (basically blogs and websites that use adsense). When an adsense user (a website owner) gets approved for adsense, they get approved based on one website and can then put adsense ads on any of their sites without needing any further approval. I can see how some people would abuse this and put their ads on garbage pages, but for them it's just a matter of time before someone reports them to Google for a TOS violation (use the little arrow attached to any adsense ad) and gets their account banned.
In short, an advertiser can easily opt to only have its ads appear in search results. If it agrees to have its ads appear on the Google content network, it runs the risk of its ads occasionally showing up on garbage sites. Of course, for most who pay for ads on a per-click basis, this won't have any affect because no one is clicking on the garbage site ads. And before anyone says anything about click fraud, Google is actually pretty aggressive about detecting that and disallowing adsense users from making money on illegitimate clicks.
It was not a secrect for anybody in the industry for the last 10 years that the lion share of PPC traffic comes from Russian clickfarms.
Irony overflow
*quietly bursts into flames*
Requiem for the American Dream
Yo Dawg, I see you like false advertising, so I put out some false advertising for your false advertisement.
I hate to get the drive-by malware detected warnings. Can't they spend a tiny bit to just not support the criminals?