Google to pay $100 million to settle 14-year-old advertising lawsuit

Google volition wage $100 cardinal to settee a people enactment suit accusing the institution of charging for clicks connected ads placed extracurricular the geographic locations selected by advertisers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The proposed settlement was filed successful a California tribunal connected Thursday and inactive requires support by a judge.

The lawsuit, archetypal filed successful 2011, centers astir Google Adwords — present called Google Ads — and claimed Google broke California’s Unfair Competition instrumentality by misleading advertisers astir the locations it would amusement their ads. It besides alleged Google didn’t travel done connected its committedness to supply “Smart Pricing” discounts.

“This lawsuit was astir advertisement merchandise features we changed implicit a decennary agone and we’re pleased it’s resolved,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said successful an emailed connection to The Verge.

Google has adjacent bigger ineligible challenges with a national antitrust suit that could unit it to merchantability Chrome. It besides faced proceedings implicit the DOJ’s different suit that accused it of creating a monopoly successful the advertizing exertion industry.

The colony comes aft “extensive” information discovery, which counsel for the plaintiffs accidental progressive reviewing much than 910,000 pages of documents and “multiple terabytes” of click information from Google. The people includes advertisers who utilized Google’s AdWords programme betwixt June 1, 2009 and December 13, 2012.