[LINK] SMH: 'Vanishing up each other's google'

[Tom Worthington]

At 09:09 AM 18/07/2007, Roger Clarke wrote:
>[Here's Alan Kohler's typically pithy take on the case being run by 
>the Australian competition regulator ACCC against Google. ...

Some months ago I tried out Google AdWords, buying some ads to see 
how it worked <http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/adwords.shtml>.

I limited myself to about 15 cents per ad and tried some very precise 
targeting, such as only readers within 30 km of the parliament houses 
in Canberra, Sydney and Beijing, who are interested in urban 
transportation policy for busways. This cost me a few dollars a month 
(there are not that many advertisers interested in advertising 
government policy, or people wanting to read it).

To make it more commercial, I also tried some ads for selling model 
trains. I tried to place an ad for a model of the Thalys high speed 
European train I had travelled on 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2004/europe/br.shtml>. The ad was refused by 
Google's system, as "Thalys" is a trademark of the train company.

So Google apparently goes to some effort to automatically check that 
terms are not misused. But the rules about use of business names are 
somewhat looser than trademarks and would be difficult to automate.

Using e-commerce in another language to sell things like David Malouf 
in German 
<http://astore.amazon.de/australien-kultur-reise-21/?node=33> 
and  French 
<http://astore.amazon.de/australien-kultur-reise-21/?node=33>, is not 
so difficult. But Japanese is much more difficult 
<http://astore.amazon.co.jp/australian-22/>. Imagine trying to make 
sure you did not accidently misuse some trademark or other term in the process.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml