Should everyone with a canceled A/C sue Google?
p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- Mega online advertising company Google still owes me $$$.
“Money really does talk, and radically different standards of right and wrong are applied depending on how much of it you have,” I posted three years ago, going on, “If you’re Google, say, you can get away with stuff you can’t even dream about if you’re a lesser entity.
“You can, for example, refuse to pay what you owe …”
Will I ever get the money due to me from Google for AdSense ads payments?
No chance. I still don’t have the wherewithall to sue Google in a civil action (although I’d love to be able to do so), and there’s no way I can go to the US to follow Aaron Greenspan’s example.
He’s president and CEO of Think Computer, and the author of Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era.
Google was in debt to him as well and eventually, he took Google on in a small claims court and won, as he reports at length and in detail in the Huffington Post.
Unlike him, I have no idea how much they actually owe me. And I’m not even sure that, as a Canadian, I’d be eligible to go after Google even if I could afford to go the States.
AdSense NonSense
I had a box with Google ads, and as I posted, “The income never amounted to much, but when you don’t have a lot, it all counts. But we didn’t like Adsense and tried to weed out the numerous obviously dodgy and tacky ads.
“Then at the beginning of the year, two things happened: the panel suddenly went blank and Google deliberately, and as publicly as possible, tried to humiliate p2pnet.”
I went on »»»
The box at the top of the page used to be a Google Search for p2pnet. But suddenly, when readers tried to search p2pnet all they saw was:
Forbidden – Your client does not have permission to get ********* from this server. Client IP address: xx.xx.xxx.xxx [They even included the actual IP addie.]
The website you`ve just visited has tried to provide you with search results from Google. Unfortunately, the site violates our terms of service so your search could not be completed.
Nice.
Google was accusing us of being consciously dishonest, claiming we`d been generating false clicks.
We hadn`t been doing anything of the kind, and wouldn`t have known how even if we`d wanted to.
But Do No Evil Google made the claim without any attempt to discover if it was true. And it`s blankly refused to offer an explanation of how it arrived at its completely erroneous conclusions.
It hasn`t even had the courtesy to answer p2pnet emails and has flatly refused to pay the tiny amount of money it owes us.
We even emailed Google ceo Eric Schmidt, but he didn`t bother to respond either.
I also emailed Google press contacts David Krane, corporate PR; Michael Mayzel, advertising PR; Nathan Tyler, technology PR; Eileen Rodriguez, consumer PR; and, Debbie Frost, international PR, with whom I’d had previous correspondence when Google was found to have been censoring news inside Communist China.
Nada. They didn’t reply either.
And I know I’m far from being alone; that there are scores of other people out there to whom Google owes money, sometimes a little, but sometimes a lot.
Says Aaron at the end of his long Huffington Post article »»»
On January 15, 2009, I walked over to the Santa Clara County courthouse in Palo Alto, which conveniently fell within the same county lines as Google’s home of Mountain View, and filed a civil small claims lawsuit for $721.00–the amount Google owed Think when it disabled the account–using form SC-100. For a total of $40.00 in court fees, I arranged for Google, Inc. to be served by certified mail. The hearing was scheduled for March 2, 2009.
Since lawyers are not permitted in small claims court, Google instead sent Stephanie Milani, a Litigation Paralegal. During the short last-ditch-resolution period before the hearings on the afternoon schedule began, Ms. Milani argued that I must have done something wrong to deserve my fate. When I asked her what, she didn’t know. The AdSense engineers had not told her.
“Google can terminate your account for any reason,” she told me.
“Not any reason,” I said. “Not because I have blue eyes. Or brown eyes.” After being told to quiet down by the courtroom guard, we decided that we had reached an impasse, exchanged documents, and went back into the court room.
Arguing before that day’s pro tempore judge, I pointed out that my company had done nothing wrong to deserve termination of the contract, that Google could not prove any wrongdoing, that Google’s fraud detection algorithm was imperfect by definition (since one cannot intuit moral intent through mathematical analysis), that advertisers must already agree to bear risk as part of the AdWords terms and conditions (clause 5), and that Google had gone to great lengths (including eliminating the ability to view account records) to make it difficult to dispute anything–all while owing Think money. In fact, terminating accounts for “posing significant risk” just when they started to earn significant amounts of money seemed like a great way for Google to cut accounting liabilities in a difficult economic climate. After my explanation, the judge had a question.
“What was the reason Google gave you for disabling your account?”
“Beyond, ‘posing a signficicant risk to advertisers,’ they didn’t give a reason.” I said. “I don’t know.”
Google’s Ms. Milani didn’t know either. She argued that advertisers had already been refunded my $721.00, even if they hadn’t asked for a refund. She claimed that Google could terminate accounts for any or no reason, and that I had agreed to such terms by signing up for AdSense in the first place. She even said that I’d admitted to violating the terms of service when I sent in my appeal form, because I had mentioned that my new domain name was only a placeholder site.
In fact, clause 6 of the AdSense for Content Terms and Conditions does not allow Google to terminate accounts for “no” reason–only “any” reason. Much to my amusement, the judge interrupted her to make a point that sounded familiar.
“But you couldn’t terminate my account because of the color of my eyes, could you? I have brown eyes. You couldn’t terminate my account because of that.”
Ms. Milani reiterated her previous arguments, but the judge didn’t buy them. “I don’t think I have the power here in Palo Alto small claims court to make you reinstate his account, but I think you owe this young man $721,” he said finally. “I think there might be money in Google’s treasury for that.”
In the end, printed on a baby blue sheet of paper by the clerk’s aging dot matrix printer, the judgment was actually entered for $761.00 total, due to the $40.00 court costs. I couldn’t help but to smile in front of the judge.
“But it’s not fair!” Google’s paralegal protested. “What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?”
It’s a valid question. Yet until Google changes its policies to become more transparent, which might also reassure skeptics that AdWords and AdSense, which have oddly limited reporting capabilities, aren’t just two sides of the same ponzi scheme (for why else would one want to terminate legitimate accounts with high monthly liabilities when they’re supposed to be making money for Google on each click?)–I will give this answer:
Maybe everyone whose account was canceled, should.
Class action, anyone?
Jon Newton – p2pnet
Huffington Post – Why I Sued Google (and Won), March 6, 2009
dodgy and tacky – Google yanks p2pnet ads, February 1, 2006
answer p2pnet – Google yanks p2pnet ads: II, February 4, 2006
refused to pay – More Adsense click fraud BS, April 11, 2006
wuz banned – Adsense, p2pnet and `fake clicks`, February 11, 2006
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March 6th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I’d recommend that people didn’t sell their audience’s eyeballs to advertisers in the first place.
Sell your audience what they want to buy from you. Don’t cannibalise a chunk of what value they do perceive in your work at disproportionate expense by devaluing it with advertising. The monetary return you make is a small fraction of the loss in value to your audience.
March 6th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
“Iâd recommend that people didnât sell their audienceâs eyeballs…”
(It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one who thinks this way.)
I think Jon’s done a pretty good job of keeping the ads at a sensible level.
And, this is one of the few sites left, I’ve noticed, that doesn’t try to insert a pop-under as soon as the URL begins to resolve, or at any other time while connected.
Keeping stuff like that out is something I really appreciate, however, the down side, of course, is that it limits the amount of possible revenue for the site operator. If anything (and I can’t believe I’m about to say this…), Jon could probably do with a little more ad content (and the revenue)!
I’ve been so focused on the content and dialogue, I often don’t even take note of the presence of the ads.
(Probably due to the fact that less advertising facilitates this focus.)
Talk about a Catch 22!