Google Taken to Court by the ACCC

July 12th, 2007

In Australia we have a very powerful competition regulator. This probably stems mainly from Australia’s strong stance on competition and free trade – when your national economy depends so heavily on export income, free trade tends to be fairly important.

The Australian Competition Regulator routinely shuts down or imposes massive fines on companies that engage in anti-competitive or deceptive behaviour – and it seems it has my favourite search engine in its sights – in particular the ACCC  is concerned about Google sponsored links (adwords) – and the way some companies use them to gouge other people’s businesses – essentially the regulator sees this as false and misleading conduct and is trying to get a ruling holding Google responsible for the actions of its’ advertisers. Any thoughts on this? Matt

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  • 1. Craig  |  July 17th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

    Google also continues to allegedly fail to “adequately distinguish sponsored links from ‘organic’ search results”, according to an ACCC statement.

    Even a screen reader for the blind can tell the difference. Maybe the ACCC should cough up the dough to buy a couple.

    As for

    The ACCC said that in 2005, sponsored links titled “Kloster Ford” and “Charlestown Toyota” allegedly appeared on Google, but the links allegedly directed users to the Trading Post website.

    One would have to see the sponsored ads at that time to judge but considering neither “Kloster”, “Kloster Ford” nor “Charlestown”, “Charlestown Toyota” are registered trademarks, could Google play Internet advertising police even if they wanted to?

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