If you have a dispute with Google over a relatively small amount of money, it’s probably best to take the company to small claims court. Joining a class action suit will only make lawyers rich and leave advertisers with advertising credit.
The latest lawsuit settlement reconfirms this outcome. CLRB Hanson v. Google, a high profile case because it involves Howard Stern as a plaintiff, has been settled for $20 million. The suit involved a dispute over Google mishandling budget caps set by advertisers.
Under the terms of the settlement, attorneys collect $5 million, the named plaintiffs get about $20,000 each, and the rest ($14.7 million) goes into a Google account for advertisers wanting to make a claim on similar grounds. They’ll be paid in ad credits and they must be current advertisers.
This is proved to be how things go in the class action advertiser suit against Google world. A few years back, Google settled a $90 million click fraud suit. Lawyers got $30 million. Advertisers feeling already cheated signed up to collect a percentage of what they claimed to begin with in the form of ad credits. Around the same time, Yahoo settled a similar case in the same way.
In other words, the outcome of cases like this is lawyers get rich, search engines get a big discount, and advertisers get the shaft.
One might do better to sue Google in Santa Clara County small claims court, like Aaron Greenspan (who alleges also he’s the real creator of Facebook) who took his $721 complaint there. Thanks to small claims court rules, Google couldn’t send one of its expensive lawyers and instead sent instead a paralegal, who knew nothing about the case in general and only repeated the terms of service in court.
The judge sided with Greenspan and figured Google could afford to fork over the $700.
