Begin forwarded message:
From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>
Date: October 24, 2009 6:40:28 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: Fwd: [IP] Google "disapproves" net neutrality ad
PDFs are generally viewable from a browser plug-in, rather than a
separate application. As are YouTube videos, by the way, to which Google
and many AdWords ads link directly. Google also routinely returns direct
links to PDFs in its search results. Also, the error message said,
"Destination URL not working."
"Not working?" It works perfectly.
What's more, the ad has pointed to that PDF and has produced hits for more than a year. It was only blocked this Thursday -- the day of the FCC vote. Coincidence?
--Brett Glass
At 03:43 PM 10/24/2009, Dave Farber wrote:
"Not working?" It works perfectly.
What's more, the ad has pointed to that PDF and has produced hits for more than a year. It was only blocked this Thursday -- the day of the FCC vote. Coincidence?
--Brett Glass
At 03:43 PM 10/24/2009, Dave Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message:
From: Gavin Estey <gavin@estey.com>
Date: October 24, 2009 17:19:05 EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] Google "disapproves" net neutrality ad
It's more likely that the ad was in breach of the Adwords guidelines instead of Google being evil, with the landing page being a PDF:
Destination URL
Your destination URL cannot link to an email address or a file. This includes an image, audio, video, or document file that requires an additional program or application to open or run.
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs&topic=16862&view=all
Gavin.
Dave Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>s
Date: October 24, 2009 16:23:04 EDT
To: dave@farber.net, Ip ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Google "disapproves" net neutrality ad
Dave, and everyone:
Several months ago, I noticed that when one typed the phrase "network neutrality" into Google's search engine, the top listed results all advocated Google's regulatory agenda. In fact, Google was contributing free advertising to groups which advocated "network neutrality" regulation (see http://www.google.com/grants/ ). This gave them an unfair advantage. They could place very high "bids" but not be charged for them, so their ads were guaranteed to show up on Google's result pages whereas paid ads might not.
I therefore created a simple advertisement, using Google's "AdWords" facility, which pointed to a white paper I had written on the issue. This white paper advocated regulation only in instances of anticompetitive practices or market failure, and recommended that content and application providers (including Google) who could serve as gatekeepers be scrutinized for anti-consumer practices as well as ISPs. (You can see the paper at
http://www.brettglass.com/principles.pdf
on my Web site.)
Then, on the morning of the FCC's vote on a Notice of Proposed Rule Making on "network neutrality" regulation, I received the following notice from Google:
Subject: Your Google AdWords Approval Status
Hello,
Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. After reviewing your
account, we've found that one or more of your ads or keywords doesn't
meet our guidelines.
I entered Google's Web interface, and discovered that -- during the days before today's FCC meeting -- the ad had received large numbers of clickthroughs. This number dropped to zero, of course, when Google blocked the ad.
I further discovered that the supposed "reason" for blocking the ad was given as "Destination URL not working." So, I checked the Web server and its logs. I discovered that in fact the server had been working perfectly. What's more, according to the log, Google's "bots" had visited the URL of the document twice less than 24 hours before and had issued conditional "GET" requests. Each received a "304" response (meaning that the page was present and had not been recently changed). The log entries looked like this:
crawl-66-249-67-74.googlebot.com - - [21/Oct/2009:10:49:45 -0600] "GET /principles.pdf HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
rate-limited-proxy-209-85-238-139.google.com - - [21/Oct/2009:21:21:53 -0600] "GET /principles.pdf HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "
AdsBot-Google (+ http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)"
Google's statistics for the ad showed that after it had received these POSITIVE responses, the clickthrough rate dropped to zero as Google dropped the ad.
I immediately resubmitted the ad to Google's advertising system, and at first the site said that the ad was "pending review." When I checked later, Google's site said that it had again rejected the ad again because its destination URL was supposedly "unreachable," even though Google's "bots" had made two more successful visits to the document since that time:
crawl-66-249-67-74.googlebot.com - - [22/Oct/2009:16:15:09 -0600] "GET /principles.pdf HTTP/1.1" 200 31639 "-" "Mozilla/
5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
rate-limited-proxy-209-85-238-139.google.com - - [23/Oct/2009:00:55:13 -0600] "GET /principles.pdf HTTP/1.1" 200 31639 "
-" "AdsBot-Google (+ http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)"
I have resubmitted the ad a third time, and at this writing it is still "pending approval" and is not appearing.
In the meantime, other ads, pointing to other pages on the same group of servers, have continued to be active. Only the one ad pointing to the paper regarding "network neutrality" regulation -- which advocates that content and application providers be scrutinized to the same extent as ISPs for anti-consumer behavior -- is blocked.
It is noteworthy that Google has advocated that "network neutrality" regulation be applied to ISPs such as myself (even though we have not ever censored legal content), but at the same time has advocated that it not be subject to such regulations, even though it serves as a gatekeeper itself. It has even had this change written into the rules proposed in the NPRM released by the FCC on Thursday.
I will leave inferences from these events to the reader.
--Brett Glass