One London web entrepreneur tells me: “They let through borderline scams — eg ‘Click here to win an iPad’, small print: you consent to be charged £4.50 per text and receive one text per day. We were totally dogged by these.”
Scams are one thing. There are worse. I’ve seen some examples of the worst sort of ads Google has let through. They are hard to describe without inviting attention from the police (seriously).
Google says it encourages websites to report dodgy ads. One correspondent describes this as “a woefully inadequate and laborious reporting mechanism that just doesn’t work”.
Google’s response: it works fine.
GroundUp says not. Geffen again: “We have navigated Google’s tortuous online complaints system to write to the company in the hope that a human or artificially intelligent being might take action — to no avail.”
The wider allegation against Google is that it wields its immense power far too casually. It makes hugely impactful changes to its ad policies that could damage small firms with very little communication.
The trouble with Google to outsiders has always been that it is so certain of its own brilliance, its own benefit to human kind, that it can’t accept that it can ever do anything wrong.
If Google did it, that must mean it was correct to do so, is more or less its approach to everything.
Back in 2004 when Google was first joining the stock market, it embraced the slogan “Don’t Be Evil”, a sign of its ethics and morality.
This slogan was famously dubbed “bullshit” by Apple’s Steve Jobs in 2010 and now seems to have been dropped.
Alphabet, Google’s parent, states in its code of conduct simply that employees should “do the right thing”. By whom?
Last week The Times reported that Google plans to introduce an adblocker for its Chrome internet browser that would block bad ads, though this is unlikely to include those from its own ad network.
That would seem likely to give Google an even bigger stranglehold on the internet advertising market, of which it already has 60%.
Competition authorities should get into this issue. And perhaps web firms should vote with their feet.
