"We are only withdrawing as a representative plaintiff," said
Scott Boyenger, Click Defense's Chief Executive Officer, "in order
to concentrate our efforts in helping our clients develop their
claims of click fraud. We remain a member of the class and our
click fraud claims against Google will still be litigated when and
if the class is certified."
The suit, which is seeking class action status, alleges that
Google’s failure has cost users of its AdSense scheme at least $5
million.
The AdSense system allows advertisers to display targeted ads on
websites in return for the payment of a fee to Google each time an
internet user clicks on one of their ads. Google then repays part
of the fee to the web page owner. This is different to Google’s
AdWords service, which allows advertisers to sponsor particular
search terms so that, whenever that term is searched in Google, the
advertiser’s link will appear next to the search results.
However, the AdSense scheme is open to abuse by website owners
who, keen to boost the fees repaid to them by Google, try to ensure
that the third party adverts displayed on their site are clicked as
often as possible. As a result, the search engine’s AdSense program
policy states:
“Any method that artificially generates
clicks is strictly prohibited. These prohibited methods include but
are not limited to: repeated manual clicks, incentives to click,
using robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive
software. Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason
is prohibited, to avoid potential inflation of advertiser
costs”.
This was not enough for Click Defense, which in June filed suit,
alleging that Google refused to take steps to prevent click fraud,
even though the company was well aware of the practice. But the
firm has now withdrawn as representative plaintiff, handing the job
over to AIT.
According to Clarence Briggs, AIT's Chief Executive Officer, AIT
has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fraudulent clicks even
though Google has the capability to detect fraud.
"Google is able to block spamming efforts from its own Google
Gmail service and should do the same to protect its pay-per-click
advertising clients. However, Google chooses to do nothing because
substantive action would both invalidate the current paid search
model and because a lot of people are making a lot of money from
this," he said.
"We have been watching this and documenting it for some time,
not only for ourselves but for our customers from our network and
several other networks," he added, "and we have the technical
expertise to prove without a doubt that it is happening and that
Google could do something about it if they wanted to.”
Google denies the allegations. In June a spokesman for the firm
told Reuters that the company believes the lawsuit is without
merit.
