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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

I hate to suggest this. I repeat, I really hate to suggest this:

It is time for those affected to unite behind a push to initiate Congressional action against Google (and possibly others) for these practice. They are highly destructive and unfair. These companies ARE huge monopolies. They just can't be allowed to behave this way.

I am the first one to raise my voice against more government incursions into our daily lives. However, there are cases where very few options remain on the table.

Unless Google, eBay, Paypal and others who are committing these kinds of acts on a daily basis change their tune in a hurry I think that a collision with government action is unavoidable.

A united front with government backing is probably the only viable option.

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As I said in my response to you 23 days ago[0], we have to be very careful that whatever we ask Congress to do doesn't get warped into something that protects eBay, Google, and PayPal against smaller competitors, e.g. by imposing a mandatory per-customer cost that is untenable for startups.

In the case of AdSense, if such a measure proves absolutely necessary, perhaps the remedy should be as simple as requiring those disabled accounts who prove they are a real life human to be able to communicate with a real life human at Google to discuss the evidence against their account.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3697448

Absolutely agreed. In my opinion, Government is the least desirable option in all cases. It's a hatchet when you need a scalpel.

Yet, here we are, 23 days later (interesting that you remembered) having the same discussion. This is happening with far greater frequency than publicly exposed. I've seen it first hand. You have to wonder what Google's trail of destruction might look like.

In the end these are families and businesses that are being affected in very signifiant ways. If one were to want to play the populist card, you could also say that jobs might be lost (or not created) when Google takes actions that damage or destroy company revenue streams.

Also agree that it is not a simple problem to solve. That said, if the problem is too big for Google to deal with it then maybe they should stick with search and bow out of the ad serving business.

A company as large as Google can't be compelled to make changes by one or a few individuals voicing their concerns. This is the fundamental problem. If they were good netizens they'd jump at the opportunity to fix the problem, no matter how difficult it might be. Hire another 100 engineers and figure it out.

The threat of a force greater than theirs might just be the only reason to compel a company as powerful as Google to make changes. That, perhaps, is my greater point.

I really don't want to see government regulate any of it. But I am not opposed to using government to force change or capitulation when few other options appear to be viable.

If Google is so bad at this, wouldn't a better approach be to start or support an alternative ad network that does what you want? You sound extremely confident that Google is doing a horrible job in this space, so a competitor should just be able to do better and eat their lunch. As far as I know, Google hasn't been accused of any anticompetitive behavior, so they're not stopping you. That would be much less radical than lobbying Congress for some vaguely defined "action".

I suspect you will find that once you get to a scale similar to Google's, you'll find yourself making similar tradeoffs. You could probably be a little better, but I don't think it's possible to be both forgiving and resilient against fraudsters.

EDIT: On rereading, this sounded a little bit passive-aggressive, so I've rephrased it a bit. Hopefully it comes across more as an observation and less like an attack now.

You could run the exact same fraud systems and policies, but also offer customer support. It's not the fraud systems that are preventing competitors, it's achieving the critical mass of advertisers to offer competitive ad fill and revenue rates. It doesn't matter if you're the friendliest company in the world if you can't provide enough ads to pay as much, or anywhere near, what Google will pay the same site.

alternatively, Google can be slapped with a class action lawsuit

I know their emails always say "we've refunded your money to the advertiser"...but has anyone seen proof of this? Any of you that advertise with Adwords Content...ever see a refund for any clicks?

> ever see a refund for any clicks?

Yes, all the time. Here's what it looks like in the billing summary:

http://i.imgur.com/JVSVO.png

The alt text for the question mark graphic: "Your account has been credited for invalid clicks that escaped automatic detection."

> Any of you that advertise with Adwords Content...ever see a refund for any clicks?

Yes

I imagine if the advertisers weren't receiving refunds they would be the ones contemplating a class action.

Let me also be constructive and suggest ways in which Google could make this process fair.

First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure.

New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place.

It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves.

During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical.

If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them.

One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem!

After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice.

If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action.

This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not.

This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site.

Once the revenue reaches zero ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice.

Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases.

Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it.

The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems.

Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin.

At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue.

Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%.

Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account.

I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem.

I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It's not fair.

My AdWords account was suspended for what turned out to be a simple and easy to make mistake.

One of my landing pages was mistakenly flagged as a bridge page. I suspended the campaign, tweaked the advertising in a way that (based on Google's own bridge page definition) should have been enough, and assumed the problem was resolved.

I decided to try something else, left the campaign stopped, and created a new one. The site for the new campaign was just my blog, so I didn't think it could create a problem. Suspended within an hour.

I learned from others who experienced the same problem that starting a campaign after one of your other campaigns is suspended without contacting Google will get your account suspended. It took an escalating campaign of contact across several Google and non-Google venues to get a response.

Some time later my account was reinstated. It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation and apology. Your proposed solution would have kept it from ever reaching the point of suspension.

It shouldn't take that much effort just to find out something you did was a problem. I couldn't stomach putting in the effort to create another campaign on AdWords after being unsuspended. Who knows what other trap I would fall into?

So when they are lenient with policing ads they get sued for click-fraud and when they are strict then the government should intervene?! surly there must be a third option.

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