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The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) has dropped their "Deceptive Advertising on Google" case against Google's Australian and Irish subsidiaries. They will now focus their efforts on Google's US parent company and Trading Post. What's all the kerfuffle about? We're still in the Wild West days of the Internet. The frontier is being tested. There is the case of Virgin Australia being sued from breach of copyright from taking an image of Internet website off Flickr. Then there was the case of the 15 year old being sued in Finland for a YouTube video.

In ACCC's case against Google they launched legal action against Google Australia, US-based Google Inc., Google Ireland and the Sensis subsidiary Trading Post in July, alleging misleading and deceptive conduct over search results. In documents filed with the court, the consumer regulator claimed Google did not clearly distinguish between normal organic search results and advertisements at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), which Google calls "Sponsored Links". Google was therefore misleading search enginer users because they claimed to rank search results based on relevance, not the money it received from advertisers.

To add to the deceptive advertising case on Google, the ACCC is also testing the extent to which a company can use a competitor's name to attract customers in search engine advertisements. A case which could set a world-first precedent. (Possibly also the end to that eBay advertising practise where they set some "random word" for sale on eBay") The ACCC claimed Trading Post used the names of two competitors to trigger sponsored search results advertising its own website. Ads appearing under Google's Sponsored Links section titled "Kloster Ford" and"Charlestown Toyota" linked to the Trading Post site. The ACCC said Trading Post and Google breached the Trade Practices Act because Trading Post used the names of the car dealerships despite having no affiliation with them. While they were not targeted by the ACCC in this case, the competition regulator also accused Microsoft's Xbox arm, STA Travel, eBay, CarsGuide.com.au and CareerOne of placing misleading or deceptive ads on Google, in the same way Trading Post did. For instance, a Google search for "Playstation2", Sony's games console, returned a sponsored link titled "Playstation2", but the ad linked to Microsoft's Xbox 360 site.

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