There is a quite remarkable article in the Huffington Post by Aaron Greenspan, a web entrepreneur who took Google to small claims court–and won.

Greenspan was using Google’s AdSense on a site of his. AdSense is Google’s ad network that displays ads from Google’s clients, and Google pays the publishers for clickthroughs.

After amassing $721.00 through AdSense, Google–without warning–canceled Greenspan’s account, and did not pay him the money he was due. Google gave no reason for why his account was canceled, other than to say he was posing a “significant risk” to Google’s advertisers.

Then began Greenspan’s long process of trying to figure out what happened. His many phone calls did not connect him with anyone on the AdSense team. His emails were left unanswered. In fact, despite his extreme diligence, he never spoke to or received correspondence from anyone at Google that could tell him anything about his cancellation.

Finally, he decided to take a different route. He filed a claim in small claims court against Google for the unpaid $721.00. Google sent a paralegal representative to battle Greenspan (lawyers are not allowed in small claims court) and she didn’t eve know why his account was canceled. To this day, he has no idea why his AdSense account was closed down.

The paralegal who represented Google, Stephanie Milani, fell back on the AdSense terms of service which state that Google can terminate an account for any reason. Comically, both Greenspan and the judge in the case asked if Google could terminate an account based on the color of somebody’s eyes.

Finally, Milani asked the judge, “What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?” What indeed.

It may be fair to call Google’s laws Draconian, but it’s hard to know how harsh they are if people don’t really know the reasoning behind them. It does not seem right that they are allowed to hide behind the “for any reason” argument when canceling an account. First of all, this is completely arbitrary and unfair practice that could open up publishers to being victimized by fraudulent cancellations. Second, by having this massive “for any reason” umbrella in their ToS, it makes it so Google does not feel compelled to provide any customer service. When the answer to every question is “we can do what we want, there doesn’t need to be a reason,” then there is no accountability. There is, in Google’s eyes, no reason to answer the question, “why?”

Google’s not the only site like this, but as long as they are the biggest property on the web, they set the standards by which other sites are measured. This is one very troubling story, and is a reason why the court system, though fraught with problems of its own, is often the only recourse for the little guy against the giant.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 12:06 amand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.