Australia court finds Google hosted misleading ads

Australia court finds Google hosted misleading ads

news.smh.com.au

An Australian court on Tuesday found Google Inc. guilty of breaching trade law by hosting misleading or deceptive advertisements in a ruling that holds search engines responsible for their advertisers' content.

Three Federal Court judges unanimously overturned a lower court's ruling from September last year that Google was not responsible for advertisers' breaches of Australia's Trade Practices Act.

The advertisers used the names of competitors as keywords to trigger their own ads appearing.

(visit the link for the full news article)

"This is an important outcome because it makes it clear that Google and other search engine providers which use similar technology to Google will be directly accountable for misleading or deceptive paid search results," Sims said in a statement.

I am glad that Google has been found guilty, even if the outcome wasn't enitrely significant, as it shows that these big companies can be touched.

news.smh.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by daaskapital


what happened to the principle that the ad creator was responsible for the content ?

PS - does this ruling now give google legal license to censor any ads submitted to it ?

What is there to be happy about? This ruling was against Google, but the net is made up of millions of small fish along side the whales like them, Making life hard for online ads by slamming those that run the system won't hurt a billion dollar profit monster like Google. They'll just hire however many it takes to cross t's and dot i's.

There are A LOT of people and sites that exist only thanks to Google ads and the fact the razor thin margins make ends meet over the long term. Dull those margins even more...and many more will ask why they even bother? Little people are the only ones to get hurt....and why? Idiots can't keep themselves from clicking the ads they ought to know better than to follow in the first place.

S/F for the catch though.... It's good to know how totally insane this crap is getting.

reply to post by daaskapital


I think it's safe to say that this will not affect Google in the slightest.

They are too big for their own good these days.

I feel that people have not realized that conglomerates like Google and Bing are actually nations living and breathing within the cyber world. They have virtual borders and virtual army's. They conduct wars and dispatch diplomats and advisers within the cyber world. People should stop viewing Google as a human company for it exists and is expanding with assistance from real world applications that we name as "humans" . This may upset or outrage or downright make people think that i may be having a nervous breakdown of a sort but i will point out that Google's and Bing's a.i. algorithms are as scary as the very systems that safe guard us from annihilating ourselves from ballistic missiles or toxic venting from industries that require artificial intelligence to manage and maintain an awareness level that has been set for human standards. When that system decides to upgrade itself and by no human intervention is when you read or hear about or is tagged as an "accident".

Human intervention into the equations of Google and Bing are addons these days, they do not rewrite the whole code they simply add code similar to how you add browser addons to further enhance your human and cyber world interaction to make it as seamless as possible. I guess many know this and many have taken it for granted that all gadgets are fun, well they are far from fun. New concepts and applications are simply apparatuses and there function is to enhance the interaction between a biological organism and a technological organism to allow as previously mentioned a seamless merger of two units inorder to create, or one that has almost been created as a third organism, a hybrid of the two if i may be allowed to describe as so.

Originally posted by cerebralassassins
I feel that people have not realized that conglomerates like Google and Bing are actually nations living and breathing within the cyber world.

The "cyber world," you speak of, does not exist. Google's search is a glorified textual pattern matching algorithm. It is not artificial intelligence. It is not growing, scheming, and waiting...plotting for the day of its' cybernetic revolt.

The corporation might be impervious to national courts because of its' money; but that is a purely real world consideration. It is not due to any element of transhumanist thinking at all.

Originally posted by ignorant_ape
reply to post by daaskapital

 

what happened to the principle that the ad creator was responsible for the content ?

PS - does this ruling now give google legal license to censor any ads submitted to it ?

In any other media, this isn't the case. The publisher (as in a Newspaper) or other medium (TV/Radio) has a certain amount of responsibility for the advertisements they carry. I fail to see the problem with this ruling, to be honest.