Google Takes Rogue Pharmacies to Court for Circumventing Advertising Policy

Google is getting sick and tired of advertisements of rogue pharmacies that are illegally selling drugs on the Internet. Despite its best efforts, Google has been unsuccessful in banning all illegal online pharmacies from its advertising platform. So this morning Google filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against those advertisers that have broken Google’s advertising rules:

Litigation of this kind should act as a serious deterrent to anyone thinking about circumventing our policies to advertise illegally on Google. As we identify additional bad actors, we will add them to the lawsuit. Rogue pharmacies are bad for our users, for legitimate online pharmacies and for the entire e-commerce industry—so we are going to keep investing time and money to stop these kinds of harmful practices.

I’d love to read more about it, but unfortunately there is no more to the story (yet).

Update - September 22, 2010; 8.30PM GMT+1

Eric Goldman has posted the Google complaint on Scribd.