Is Google Inc. getting so big that it can't keep an eye on its management staff or has You can make money without doing evil been tossed out the backdoor onto obsolete corporate philosophy pile?
Reuters 24th August 2011 - Google Inc has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a criminal probe into ads it accepted for online Canadian pharmacies selling drugs in the United States, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.
The advertisements led to illegal imports of prescription drugs into the country, the Justice Department said.The forfeiture is one of the largest ever in the United States, according to the department. It represents Google's revenue from Canadian pharmacy advertisements to U.S. customers through Google's AdWords program and Canadian pharmacies' revenue from U.S. sales.
Google had previously set aside that amount for a possible settlement over its advertising practices, according to a regulatory filing in May.
Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, had $29 billion in gross revenue in 2010.
I dunno, there's laws and there's laws that shouldn't exist in the first place.
ReplyDeleteA law that stops international companies advertising in the USA to protect their local carters? I'm not sure it's so evil to break that law ... e.g. see some of the comments now on the article.
Akin to Australia banning book imports and then fining an advertising company for running adverts from the UK.
Now, the fact that google and all of these other pan-nationals never seem to pay any tax, that's evil.
Think the evil might have been that some of the Canadian drug companies did not require a prescription for many of the powerful medicines that they were shipping to online customers.
ReplyDeleteTherefore these drugs may have been inapproprate for the consumer requesting them or may have even been requested to backdoor sell-on for profit.