I feel empowered when I play the capitalist game my way. I don’t work in retail or private service industry anymore but when I did, we took complainers seriously, because we knew they were representative. Now it’s called feedback. I consider my feedback very valuable and I dish it out selectively. It’s always based on problems. I only do it when it’s convenient and I don’t feel obliged to give pats on backs. I’ll buy stocks for that.

I like Google products because they work really well. I’ll have to start paying attention now to them differently, because I spend lots of time online professionally and privately and have become oblivious to static text-based ads. I think I’ve conditioned my visual attention to ignore them altogether :)

Good point, William. Why on earth would they volunteer to be DDoS’d like that?

*cough*

It really is unfortunate that Scientology got Gigaloader shut down after the last big Anonymous DDoS. Still, I’m sure some motivated people could find all the “stress testing” tools and proxies they needed to make a statement to people providing false medical information.

Not that anyone should do that. DDoS attacks are illegal after all.

I suppose a religious group being refused advertising space could argue religious discrimination (analogous to a black person not being served at the coffee counter), but I think the bar would be pretty high for them. Brings up many interesting issues though.

In fact, that’s what happened, but the religious group in question sued in the UK where the free speech legal landscape is very different from what it is in the US.

Oh, and an addendum to my last comment:
Any views expressed in my comments on this thread are mine alone, and not those of my employer, its affiliates, etc. Do not treat anything I say here about AdWords as official answer.

However, Google is a great stock to purchase. I thingk they’re currently trading around $100 a share. Check ‘em out at NASDAQ.com or SEC.gov (for you accountant types)

What a bizarre non sequitur. Although maybe it isn’t really a non sequitur, being as it is completely factually inaccurate…

In any case, the answer to the “where do we complain when the information presented isn’t factual?” is http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=adfeedback
If you lose that url, you can find it again by doing a google search for “ad policy violation” which will lead you to a google page dedicated to answering the question “How can I report an inappropriate Google ad that I saw on a site?”. That page contains instructions and links to the feedback form.

Someone just tried to put a link on my site that said an abortion is when a doctor chops a fetus into tiny pieces inside your uterus and then leaves it to die in a pan before flushing the still-alive remains down the toilet.

Wow, zombie fetus. Just how many times does one have to kill it before it stays dead?

But surely in this case, what matters is the fact that they’re saying “if you abort your baby, the eeevill abortionist will take a big chopper and cut it into little cubes of bacon, and flavour his spaghetti carbonara with it and the little bits will all individually scream in pain as he chews and swallows them, and then your baby will be poo and live in the sewers as a colony of accursed microscopic smurfs”. I mean, surely depicting members of the medical profession as being baby-murdering satanists is bad enough. Plus, if you could prove that they were playing on the fears and guilt trips of pregnant women on top of it, you know, taking all this into consideration, I wouldn’t have thought it would count as discrimination to tell them to stop it.

Now, disregarding the content of what they say on the grounds of them being Christian and going ‘whatever, you’re Christian, have this ad space’ – I would have thought that would be discrimination against them.

Of course, I have no idea of what the law actually is, but this is how it should be.

Not quite sure what you’re saying here, Angela, but SEC regulations don’t really speak to the advertising in question.

Now anti-discriminatory laws clashing with the first amendment is an interesting issue, but not quite settled law yet. The only precedent that comes to mind is the boy scouts refusal to admit homosexuals, which was settled in favor of the scouts first amendment free speech, religion, and association rights over civil rights statutes.

I suppose a religious group being refused advertising space could argue religious discrimination (analogous to a black person not being served at the coffee counter), but I think the bar would be pretty high for them. Brings up many interesting issues though.

Lies are protected as free speech. Lies in advertising (at least in the US) are a different matter, and can be subject to statutory regulation. As far as medically inaccurate information goes, there’s a lot of gray area and it depends entirely on what you’re talking about (drugs regulated by the FDA versus “supplements”, for example), who’s doing the talking, and in what forum.