Google 'close to $500m settlement' over illegal drug ads

[Archean]

Google has set aside $500 million not for an antitrust settlement, but to settle a US criminal investigation into claims that it made hundreds of millions of dollars from ads purchased by illegal online pharmacies, according to a report citing people familiar with the matter.

The Journal report is just another indication that Google's ad system can be friendly to bad actors, and it raises more questions about how far Google goes to prevent such exploitation. Harvard professor Ben Edelman estimates, for example, that the company makes nearly $500m a year from "typosquatters". In a 2010 study, he estimated that at least 938,000 domains were typosquatting on the top 3,264 ".com" websites, waiting for web users to mistype or misspell a URL, and that 57 per cent of these "mispelled" domains included Google pay-per-click ads. Typosquatting can violate US trademark law. Google says it will remove typosquatting domains if it is made aware of them.

Yes, they will remove typosquatting domains, only if someone tell them to do so.