One of several sites that have had their AdSense payments frozen by Google over accusations of click fraud has struck back and accused the search advertising company of acting in a draconian manner.
Jon Newton from the torrent site tracker P2PNet posted the latest take he has on Google’s assault on click fraud. P2PNet’s AdSense and Google search box were disabled after Google decreed the site violated its terms of service.
Newton has been having an on again/off again battle with Google over AdSense for some time. He wrote about his side of the story:
Google accused p2pnet of deliberately falsifying clicks, a completely unwarranted and totally false claim. It knowingly tried to embarrass us online and without warning, cut the Adsense ads. (Not that they were bringing in much. But it all counts.)
And Google took this draconian step without explaining how it had arrived at its erroneous conclusion, or answering any of our emails wanting to get to the bottom of things.
Newton also references ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin, who blogged that Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s view of click fraud was to “let it happen.” Google countered the argument with a lengthy response citing the quote by its CEO was taken out of context.
Newton dismissed the Google response as waffling on the whole topic of click fraud. In June, Newton wrote about the current AdSense outage that still persists with P2PNet:
Google was accusing us of being consciously dishonest, claiming we’d been generating false clicks.
We hadn’t been doing anything of the kind, and wouldn’t have known how even if we’d wanted to. But Do No Evil Google made the claim without any attempt to discover if it was true. And it’s blankly refused to offer an explanation of how it arrived at its completely erroneous conclusions. It hasn’t even had the courtesy to answer p2pnet emails and has flatly refused to pay the tiny amount of money it owes us.
That illustrates what has been perceived as a problem with Google and many other online companies: lack of communication. Google has maintained that sharing details of its click fraud detection program would assist fraudsters to defeat it, so it keeps the process in the dark.
Google likely sees its opaqueness as a valid position. Other people have claimed its approach to AdSense is flawed. Until Google finds significant impact on its multi-billion dollar ad revenue stream from customers leaving the program, their communication policies are not going to change.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
