Google agreed to pay $ 100 million in cash to settle a long -term lawsuit claiming to be overwhelmed by advertising by not submitting promised discounts and preparations for ads outside the geographical areas targeted by advertisers.
An initial settlement of the 14 -year -old collective procedures, which started in March 2011, was made late Thursday in San Jose, California, the Federal Court, and requires the approval of the judge.
Advertisers who participated in the Google AdWords program, now known as Google Ads, accused the search engine operator of violating his contract by handling its smart price formula to artificially reduce discounts.
Advertisers also said that Google, a unit of Mountain View, California -based Alphabet, has misled them to reduce the distribution of ads on the sites they identified, and the law of unjust competition in California was rejected.
On Thursday, the advertisers who used Adwords cover between January 1, 2004 and December 13, 2012.
Google denied any violations of approval of stability.
“This situation was about the advantages of the advertising product that we changed more than a decade ago, and we are happy to solve it,” said spokesman Jose Castaida in a statement sent via e -mail.
Lawyers may obtain fees up to 33 % of the settlement box, in addition to $ 4.2 million for expenses.
According to court papers, the case took a long time as the parties produced intense evidence, including more than 910,000 pages of multiple flash documents of Google click data, and participated in six brokerage sessions four different brokers.
The case is Cabrara et al v Google LLC, the American boycott court, Northern County in California, No. 11-01263.
