Sued Google Adsense Loses Appeal — Publisher Who
Man who originally won modest claim against Google loses appeal.
Aaron Greenspan won a modest claims court case against Google earlier this year. Google had canceled his Adsense account without providing a reason. The judge ruled that it can’t cancel accounts for any reason at all, and awarded Greenspan $761. Greenspan wrote an article for Huffington Post detailing the matter, which gained national attention. Google and appealed the case, which it won.
Although Greenspan tries to come across as the white knight in a follow up story on Huffington Post, he ought to be just as ashamed of his actions as Google ought to be for not telling him why his account was canceled in the first place.
Basically, Greenspan cheated. He set up a web page with Google Adsense that contained no content other than the links. Well, there was a critical piece of content above the links: text that read “Pick a link”. So he violated two terms.
Greenspan tries to get across that Google has a second program just for domains that allows ads to be shown without content and that it isn’t fair. (Note that these parked pages never say “Pick a Link”.) But at any time Greenspan could have joined that program through a Google partner (which he later did).
To be clear, Google probably ought to have just told this guy why his account was canceled in the first place: cheating. I agree that Google tends to take actions that drastically affect people without fully justifying them. But the firm doesn’t need to justify itself to cheaters.
