Google Faces Australian Suit for AdWords Practices
Google is being sued by an Australian competition watchdog agency for allegedly deceiving users over the question of paid links that look like organic search results.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, an independent Australian government body with statutory authority, has filed a suit in Australian federal court maintaining that Google has failed to adequately distinguish paid “sponsored links” from its index of natural search results. While Google identifies keyword-triggered pay-per-click ads as such in the box above the natural listings and along the right rail of the search results page, the ACCC claims that including Web pages from those advertisers in the organic results section without identifying them as sponsors is an unfair trading practice.
The suit grows out of an investigation by the ACCC of a 2005 complaint from two Australian auto dealers that Google users who looked up their brands were being shown a sponsored link to a newspaper offering used-car listings. The paper had bid on the dealer names as keywords for serving its pay-per-click ads.
Google has faced numerous lawsuits over its practice of allowing advertisers to use competitors’ trademarks as keywords, and has won most of them in the U.S. But the ACCC says this suit is the first to call into question Google’s involvement in possible unfair trading practices.
“While Google has faced court action overseas, particularly in the U.S., France and Belgium, this has generally been in relation to trademark use,” the commission said in a release. “Although the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has examined similar issues, the ACCC understands that it is the first regulatory body to seek legal clarification of Google’s conduct from a trade practices perspective.”
The ACC wants Google to make it clearer when search results are also paid advertisers, to acknowledge any wrongdoing and to defray full legal costs.
A Google spokesman said the company will fight the case in court and described the suit as “an attack on all search engines.”
