On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that
“Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest. And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything.
So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects. And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others.
It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.”
Here’s the screen cap, so you know I’m not inventing stuff.
Have to tell the truth? Why did it take action by the Florida AG before Google started making ringtone advertisers list prices in their ads? Why are the prices on other mobile content crap landing pages still hidden in nearly invisible text only an SEO would notice?
When you get to this landing page on most people’s screens, the huge headline and graphics (and occasional animation, depending which version of the ad you see) naturally draw your eyes … not the “subscription sent to your cell $9.99 per month” bit.
And why do they let so many scams and snake oil products run on their network?
This next one took in my sister, as it happens, and she’s one of the brightest, most critical-thinking people I know. This shadier side of affiliate marketing has developed the art of lying and deception to a standard the KGB would be proud of. They don’t just take advantage of gullible people. They manage to trick highly rational people with serious IQs (I know, the IQ quiz thing makes this particularly ironic).
Google needs to come clean. From a business perspective … For their users to keep trusting their ads. For the sake of showing the government that they don’t need to be regulated (though the above obviously shows you can’t trust them to self-regulate). And from a simple moral perspective, because it’s the right thing to do. (P.s. Inspiration hattips: Diorex (on scammy aff) and Aaron Wall (spam if you don’t pay G) and Danny Sullivan (Sphinn).)
Tags: advertising, Google, Spam
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