Government Regulators Shake Down Google For $500,000,000

Chris | InformationLiberation
Aug. 24, 2011

"Regulators" have forced Google to fork over $500 million in protection money because they displayed some ads some loser bureaucrat didn't fancy. The "illegal ads" were for so-called "illegal pharmacies," a.k.a. pharmacies which import the same drugs for cheaper from Canada in order to get around Big Pharma's anti-competitive U.S. monopoly laws. Google, of course, did all it could to prevent such ads from being displayed, but that's not good enough for our bankrupt government, they need fresh loot to fill their coffers, and what better way to get it than shake down one of the few American companies which is still thriving.

Google Inc. has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a U.S. government investigation into the Internet search leader's distribution of online ads from Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription and non-prescription drugs to American consumers, a U.S. attorney said Wednesday.

The settlement means the Internet search leader will not face criminal prosecution for accusations that it improperly profited from ads promoting Canadian pharmacies that illegally imported drugs into the United States, U.S. Attorney Peter F. Neronha said.

The $500 million represents the gross revenues Google collected in ad buys from the Canadian pharmacies, plus the earnings generated from the illegal sales of drugs to American consumers, federal investigators said. [...]

Google acknowledged holes in its ad system in a federal lawsuit filed last fall against dozens of "rogue" online pharmacies that were finding ways to place ads for drugs despite the company's efforts to prevent abuses. The individuals identified in the complaint were in New York, Tennessee and Ohio.

Read the full story here.

This is how government regulation works in practice, rather than in theory. In theory government regulation is supposed to help consumers by providing some sort of check on greedy businessmen, in practice government regulation is used by greedy businessmen (Big Pharma in this case) to shut down their competition in order to rob consumers.

Image: brionv via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0