Australian watchdog drops case against Google subsidiaries, pushes case against Google parent
The Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has dropped the case it filed against Google’s Irish and Australian subsidiaries last month. But the Australian watchdog has vowed to pursue the case against the Google parent company and the Trading Post for misleading users about sponsored links.
The ACCC had alleged that in 2005 the Trading Post contravened the Trade Practices Act when the business names “Kloster Ford” and “Charlestown Toyota” appeared in the title of Google sponsored links to Trading Post’s web site. Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota are Australian car dealerships who compete against Trading Post in automotive sales. The ACCC alleges that Google, by causing the Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota links to be published on its web site, also engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct.
Last month, Australian federal court judge James Allsop has asked the ACCC to provide more evidence that Google has misled the public as he was not convinced by the ACCC arguments and declared that the case was wrongly based.
Still not convinced that Google is not guilty of misleading the public over sponsored and organic search results, the ACCC will bring the case to court anew on November 16. Despite Google’s denial of the accusation, the ACCC is maintaining that Google’s search results are influenced by payment of advertisers and are not based purely on relevance or organic search ranking.
I don’t know about you, but I think Google makes it pretty clear what organic search results are and what sponsored links are. So I’m not sure why the ACCC is so hell bent on pursuing Google on this non issue.
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