The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Google on a class-action lawsuit brought against it by advertisers.
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Due to the fact each advertisers would have to receive different damages, a judge once ruled in 2012 that the lawsuit couldn’t move forward.
Google is in court over placement of AdWords advertisements challenged by a group of California advertisers.
A spokesman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., said the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit accuses [Reuters report] Google of violating California fair advertising laws because it misled advertisers.
Until March 2008, advertisers couldn’t decide where their ads would appear – other than choosing between Google properties or its content network – and the buyers allege Adwords appeared on parked domains and 404 error pages, which is next to pointless.
Google argued that the appeal court should not let the lawsuit move ahead, as damages faced by each advertiser should be calculated.
Google’s Adwords service is aimed at helping marketers to place their ads on relevant sites.
Google generated $67 billion in ad revenue in 2015. The appellate judges appeared to endorse at least one proposed methodology – the “Smart Pricing” approach – which the opinion describes as “the difference between the amount the advertiser actually paid and the amount paid reduced by the Smart Pricing discount ratio”. The company has taken steps over the years to reduce nuisance advertising on its search engine, disabling more than 780 million ads in 2015. By declining to hear the case, the Supreme Court is basically allowing the case to move forward as a class action suit.
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David Jones is a freelance writer based in Essex County, New Jersey.
