Google prepares for possible $500 million settlement with DoJ over online ads, according to SEC filing

IT World: "Google is revising down its first-quarter earnings to reflect a possible $500 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over online advertising issues," according to this 10-Q filed today with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The figure represents 22% of Google's bottom line.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Anonymous

From my experience I would guess: Click fraud.

As an advertiser you could burn cash at a breathtaking rate for the first few years, and only when it was gone realize that the traffic you had bought was at best worthless and at worst nonexistent.

The ads worked, and worked very well, for some accounts. Others just tossed their money down the Google hole.
rebdav

So will this go to the DOJ as a punitive award, for the so called benefit of the American people(read either as pork pork pork or new cars, Blackberries, and Glocks for star agents), and as usual the actual victims get nothing?
PaulR

No, this is good, eh? Now the SEC can go after all the a**holes who engineered the financial collapse.

Right?
zikman

that’s a pretty huge percentage…