Google Works To Prevent Illegal Download Sites From Having A Credit Source

The Telegraph reports Google is leading an effort to prevent illegal download sites from having a source of credit to be able to buy ads online. Google is in talks specifically with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to prevent these types of companies from using credit cards or PayPal accounts. This would help prevent these types […]

Chat with SearchBot

broken google credit cardThe Telegraph reports Google is leading an effort to prevent illegal download sites from having a source of credit to be able to buy ads online.

Google is in talks specifically with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to prevent these types of companies from using credit cards or PayPal accounts. This would help prevent these types of companies that are overseas from placing these illegal ads, when court orders cannot. They have taken internal efforts to mass ban AdWords advertisers many times throughout the years.

Google is not the first to go this route, supposedly the book publishing, music, film and television industries all use a similar method to help control piracy.

Of course, with any of these efforts, there may be false positives and some legit online advertisers may be unintentionally impacted in a negative way by these preventive measures.

The company has not yet implemented these efforts but there are ongoing talks within Google and the financial credit agencies.

A Mastercard spokesman said: “Mastercard takes online safety and security seriously. We work closely with our part­ners to ensure the best possible experience when using elec­tronic payments.” Visa gave no comment. Pay-Pal did not return a request for comment.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.