Dive Brief:
- Google is in court over placement of AdWords advertisements challenged by a group of California advertisers. The U.S. Supreme Court kept the lawsuit alive by allowing a lower court’s ruling that the action should proceed to stand.
- The Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant has faced legal action globally for various business issues most notably related to competition, privacy and online security.
- The issue in this litigation is that AdWords ads appeared in what the plaintiffs felt was undesirable online terrain such as error pages and websites that were deemed to be not legitimate.
Dive Insight:
The suit is a class-action that represents advertisers who used AdWords from 2004 and 2008. It was filed in 2008 and claimed Google violated California’s fair advertising laws by misleading advertisers on where their ads would be placed online.
Reuters reported that a federal district court judge made a 2012 ruling that the case couldn’t move forward as a class action because damages were different for each complainant, but that ruling was reversed in appeals by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last September. Google took its argument to the Supreme Court, but the current eight justices sent the litigation back down to the appellate court.
When asked for comment by Reuters, a Google spokesperson declined citing pending litigation.