Google Gets Knocked Down a Peg

[JustinB]

I love it when monopolistic corporations get reminded that they have to obey our laws.

Florida court allows Google to be sued by publisher delisted as "pure spam"However, a court in Florida has now allowed a case against Google to proceed, in which the search engine manually removed links it categorized as “pure spam” and in violation of quality guidelines. According to legal tech writer Eric Goldman, the Florida court disregarded “virtually all of Google’s arguments” to allow the lawsuit to go forward.

In my opinion, labeling a business as spam borders on the cusp of libel.



What do you think?

 

[dmarks]

I love it, if anything they should be forced to be 100% transparent when issuing a manual action.

Especially in lieu of 2 major items. They own a number of competing web properties that they have previously provided preferential treatment (thumbtack). They are restricting trade on a case by case basis and the appeals process is a complete joke. Their support forums I find mostly filled with condescending replies and considering the cleared almost 20bil in net income, they should be FORCED to provide support from real employees. (IMO)

 

[James Watt]

That's a really interesting topic Justin. In a way I think it's good for publishers to have veto power. Did you read Bryan Seeley's book? It's hard enough for Google to get rid of lead gen companies. Those companies are tenacious, and there's no doubt in my mind they'd use legal recourse to stay in business if they thought they could get away with it. On the other hand, when I see a locksmith posting on the GMB forum for having a business that got suspended for spam, at this point I don't even bother answering. I've seen so few actually get reinstated, and if the posts are honest at least, there's been more than one that's gone out of business because of it. Granted, a savvy business owner should never rely on a single source of leads for their business, but it does suck when a company can get shut down, and then get ignored when trying to get reinstated, even when they're willing to provide business license and registration information.

On the other hand, I know Facebook recently got caught suppressing politically conservative news stories. While my personal views on the Republic party didn't exactly make this an upsetting story to read, it does seem like a dangerous precedent to give companies like Facebook and Google free power to suppress or encourage access to information as they see fit. It'll be interesting to see what happens with this. If Google has to legally prove in a court of law in each case that a company they've filtered was breaking TOS, that sounds like way too big of a burden of proof. Spam's already such a huge issue...

I do think Google has some serious work to do to clean up how it deals with spam, and I guess if Google won't get their s*** in gear on their own, it's up to the government, but that still sucks. It'd be nice if Google just got their act together...