Google Bans Ads For Essay-Writing Services 264
llamapalooza writes "Google announced that it will ban essay writing firms from advertising on their site. (The prevalence of cheating on campuses has been discussed here before.) While universities have welcomed the move, the affected firms are claiming it will 'punish legitimate businesses.' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
Banned list? (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on the drug [google.com]
Anyway, who really cares who Google accepts for advertising - its what they index that really matters.
Distinction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Banned list? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not keen on this (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
Legitimate Businesses (Score:2, Insightful)
Google can choose to display or not to display any ads they want. The supreme court has found many times that the right to not speak is equally as important as freedom of speech.
Re:Banned list? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not comparable. One still allows you to find something, the other does not.
Google should never have gone into China, it makes do-no-evil-initiatives like this (where they refuse to accept money from certain companies considered by many to be unethical) look stupid.
Re:Not keen on this (Score:4, Insightful)
In what jurisdiction?
Prosititution is illegal in many parts of the land of the (hah!) free. Alchohol is illegal in some Middle Eastern countries. Drugs have different laws almost everywhere. Codeine is illegal in Greece (IIRC), Marijuana semi-legal in some countries, etc etc.
'Bout Time (Score:4, Insightful)
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
Just advertise the degree outright! (Score:2, Insightful)
Has anyone tried to get ad sense to offer them a degree?
Re:Banned list? (Score:4, Insightful)
Little evils versus Big Evils (Score:1, Insightful)
Hell, even if you think prostitution goes hand in hand with sex-slavery, the problems of sweat-shop manufacturing slavery in and outside of the US are at least 10x worse and I don't see google banning ads for outsourced manufacturing.
I would expect that if there was one company that understood ultimate importance of free flow of information it would be google. Seems like they've become lost in the forest because they can't get past the trees - tobacco, et al are small evils, censorship is a big Evil.
Re:Banned list? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prostitution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where I live it is perfectly legal to advertise prostitution [yellowpages.com.au]. I can see that google will take the attitude that it is illegal most places so it is safer for them to ban it. But there is a line to be drawn here. Essay writing services seem to be mainly an academic issue. Lots of people would never have heard about it. Perhaps they should ban advertising for game hacks.
Re:Not keen on this (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a company whose motto is "Don't be evil." If you are just now questioning whether or not they're putting their morality into their business, you have not been paying any attention at all.
Whether you agree with their morality or not, or agree that the particular decisions they've made are consistent with their openly stated (hell, vigorously publicized) moral code, are other questions entirely. But they have been very clear from day one that morality plays a central role in their business decisions.
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
It's not illegal, though (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, legitimate is even trickier. Where do you draw the line? Technically speaking, anything legal _is_ a legitimate business. If you don't want it done, just pass a law to outlaw it.
And the business side pops up all the time (e.g, "but it creates employment!") when debating whether or not to make something illegal. It sure popped up in the spam and telemarketting debates, for example, all the way to the highest level. So basically when deciding whether it's legal or not, some MPs/congressmen/whatever-you-have, already considered the business side of it, and whether or not they want businesses doing that. E.g., whether the (lack of) ethics of it outweigh the employment created, tax income, and/or bribes from that lobby. In a way they already decided if that kind of business is legitimate or not.
Employment vs inflation is a constant concern since the Great Depression, when basically suddenly supply outstripped aggregate demand. (Yes, Say's Law does still apply, but "supply creates its own demand" only by lowering prices, and in the Great Depression suddenly the only point where you could actually sell all that stuff was below the production costs.) This became even worse when most industry moved offshore. Now we need even less people producing stuff. What do you do with the rest? Leave them unemployed, like in the 19'th century? Well, that also lowers the money they can spend to buy stuff, and that-a-way lies the downwards spiral that led to the Great Depression in the first place.
So nowadays governments actually get to see that employment stays roughly where they want it, and create some extra aggregate demand. (Deficit spending, pork barrel, social security, etc.) It works too, since we no longer have the economic crisis cycles that plagued most of the 19'th century and the first part of the 20'th century. Back then it was considered _normal_ that the industry goes through bankruptcy cycles and rises from the ashes based on demanding even longer work hours and lower salaries.
In a nutshell, a government's job is to see to it that you encourage (or at least don't discourage too much) people to create more jobs that don't actually produce something. Pretend to manage each other, create whole castes of marketters just trying to steal customers from each other, or do all sorts of convenience services to each other. And chip in a little to make it all keep working. Deserved or undeserved, ethical or unethical, as long as the negative impact is small enough, it doesn't matter. It matters that unemployment doesn't get out of hand. Because noone wants another Great Depression.
That's why even when debating something as annoying as telemarketting, the question just _has_ to pop up, basically, "how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?" You don't want to be the paladin in shiny armour that saved people from all evils... at the expense of causing the economy to collapse.
At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist. In fact, encouraged to exist.
If you think that such companies are crossing the line into outright harmful, well, just lobby your lawmakers to outlaw it.
But, yeah, I'll aggree that Google is free to choose the companies it does business with.
Good, this will save them some money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Banned list? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I think a lot of people wish those robbotically-created pages that pollute the results pages weren't indexed. Crap like all the dozens of clones of Wikipedia with added advertisements; pseudo-search pages that have no actual information, not to mention those full of popups and exploits. Sometimes it takes a dozen tries before I work out a search that actually finds the thing I want, and not a viagra or porn page with the search terms salted through it.
Not censorship, service to AdSense cleints (Score:5, Insightful)
Now homework cheating services are on that list.
So this is a case where maximizing profit also happens to be "do no evil" (depending on your definition of evil).
Re:It's not illegal, though (Score:3, Insightful)
But you're right: where do you draw the line? "Legitimate" just means a business that you approve of. Are payday loan shops legitimate businesses? How about telemarketers, pawn shops, or casinos? Head shops? Porn shops? They're all legal, but whether the GP would call them "legitimate" is up to him.. and it's a pointless argument anyway.
Frankly, if Google is going to start banning ads from shady-but-legal businesses, I think they're opening up a can of worms. I know I've seen plenty of shady ads on there that had nothing to do with academic essays. Why shouldn't those be banned too?
Actually, now that you mention it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, now that you mention it, I'd rather have more prostitution ads than some of the other scams I'm bombarded with.
E.g., you almost can't go to a page that's even remotely game/gold/whatever related, without getting powerlevelling and gold farming ads nowadays. Not only that kind of cheating actively disrupts the game for everyone else, but in most cases nowadays it's a scam. There's a whole class of keylogging trojans and viruses nowadays that simply steal someone's login data. Then the scammer logs in, sells everything that guy's characters have (leaving them literally naked), then transfer the money to the scammer's characters to be advertised as "buy gold for low prices!" Even on Google.
Now I don't want to go into the whole debate of whether virtual goods should be treated as real ones, but it's:
A) just actively ruining someone's gaming experience, and
B) in a dumb destructive way at that. The price for selling those items at the vendor is often 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than their normal in-game value. It's like burning someone's house down to sell the ashes. That dumb and destructive.
Even not treating those as "property", if you put in the balance the joy of someone who bought 100 gold in a game, vs the grief of someone who lost items worth 2000 gold for that, it's a bad trade all around. It's ruining someone's _months_ of time "investment" to let someone else feel rich and powerful for maybe a couple of hours until they blow it on some stupidity at the auction house. They haven't worked much for that gold, so don't expect them to put much value on it. They'll maybe buy a weapon they'll use for 2 days until they buy more gold for the next one.
C) maybe more important, it's rewarding and encouraging activities that are destructive and predatory IRL too, not only in some virtual imaginary game world. The viruses and keyloggers are very real, and often used for other nefarious purposes too, like harvesting bank accounts, credit card numbers, as spam bots, as DDOS bots, etc. It's activities which are already bad as it is, and sadly too rewarding as it is. I don't think anyone actually wants to encourage them some more.
So, frankly, if I look at A, B and C, I appreciate a hard working prostitute a lot more. She's just providing a service for people who want it, and selling only her work and time, not actively ruining anyone else's day for something to sell.
Or I constantly see google ads for crackpot conspiracies, crackpot young-earth/flat-earth creationism, scams, frauds, phishing schemes, spyware, etc. Even Google itself had that piece of news about how many people clicked on a "Is your PC virus-free? Click here to get it virused" ad. It was on Slashdot too.
Meh. I'll take prostitution ads instead, please. No, I still wouldn't buy sex, but, hey, I'm not buying all the other crap advertised at me either. So gimme some nicer ads at least.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of ads at all. But getting rid of them completely is, obviously, not an option. So if I _have_ to see ads, let's have some good old fashioned porn and prostitution ads instead of all that crap, please.
They're more honest than half the rest of advertising too. I'm going to barf if I see one more ad for snake oil that's supposed to solve all sorts of problems that don't even exist, and with made up testimonials at that. And idiot PHBs actually believing that crap.
At least with a prostitute you can know realistically what you can get, and how it would work. Human anatomy only allows for so much variation, you know, and there's only so much that plastic surgery can do. (Admittedly, that's a lot.) You can't claim to reduce TCO 10 times, increase ROI ten times, allow untrained monkeys to write enterprise-class programs in 21 days, solve world hunger, cure cancer, and bring global enlightenment. Everyone just knows that even a kilo of silicone implants won't do that
Re:'Bout Time (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
First thing that struck my mind when reading this -- you did make sure to backup recently?
Re:It's not illegal, though (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean that a company set up for the only reason to help people to pass their exams by cheating is legal ?
I would even put it stronger : By offering a "service" like this they could be regarded as the source of the need-to-cheat (provoking it).
To make it simple : The papers obtained after a study are ment as proof that someone is fit to do certain things. Cheating on exams means that those papers are actually forged. Forgery is illegal, and aiding-and-abedding to illegal acts is illegal in itself.
But than again, IANAL.
Not a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Banning the advertisements isn't going to solve the issue of plagiarism. In fact, it could compound the problem by pushing it underground. If someone is motivated to cheat, they're probably going to cheat regardless of whether they see an advertisement on Google, or whether they have to hunt underground for a service. Afterall, is Google banning search results?
Google is not the net, doesn't have to be neutral (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Prostitution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not illegal, though (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd even question wether it's unethical. Embarrasing, yes, and telling, sure.
But unethical? If essays and theses are so easily manufactured, replicated and/or forged, perhaps it's time to reconsider the methods by which such academic achievements are evaluated.
Perhaps we should exercise some cross-discipline teamwork and have engineering and research students team up with technical writers and humanist (english, journalism, etc) students instead? Having such a team produce an original, legible and yet correct and scientifically sound paper would perhaps be a far more appropriate and useful exercise than either of the pair separately trying to do something they might suck at (and, hey, maybe we'd get journalists that dont always get the science wrong and scientific articles that dont make your eyes bleed out of it too).
"how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?"
Mmm, an annoying, incorrect and yet, sadly, far too common argument.
As, presumably, those jobs are currently paid jobs, nuking those jobs will leave those resources available in the rest of the economy instead, so of course it can absorb them. The money paying them came from somewhere, that somewhere will still have the money and will spend it elsewhere, creating new jobs instead.
Busywork, in its most useless sense, means you are diverting resources from the economy to produce something inherenly undesired. Unfortunately, that means that the wealth those resources would have otherwise produced doesnt get produced, so the economy as a whole generates a suboptimal level of wealth.
"At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist."
Actually, I'd say that the main reason is the blanket refusal to acknowledge that that whole problem is a change and distribution of wealth problem. As long as you encourage waste you dont have to call it 'wealth redistribution'. Creating (and allowing) busywork is essentially (from a wealth creation pov) no different from taxing the needed workers and putting the non-workers on welfare. It's just not as noticable and easily measured.
Of course, a much better an productive way to solve the whole problem would be to simply cut working time (which was essentially what was done in the agrarian->industrial economic revolution). Cut working time as productivity increases and production need decreases, and you solve a whole host of other issues like stress related illnesses and retirement problems.
Personally I'd far rather work four hours per day 'til I'm 80 and have everything cost half as much, rather than work 8 hours and pay twice the tax and prices to keep a whole host of people doing nothing in the economy.
Re:Banned list? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Ironic! (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, being a friend of someone who writes viruses for a living, I think there are three negatives to making virus writing illegal:
Forgive me if I don't find your defence of people whose entire business model revolves around deception terribly compelling!
Incidentally, this kind of service is hardly victimless. For every person who goes out into the world and gets a good job on the basis of a qualification they didn't earn, someone who did earn that qualification loses out. That almost certainly damages both people who did earn the qualification and the people who would hire them.
Re:Banned list? (Score:3, Insightful)
Googles intermingle top placement ads with the top search results. While they are subtly different, top placement ads often times look like search results.
But on the flip side. Who says Google must index the entire Internet? Who says they must display search results? Who says they can't filter? Sure Google is the de-facto search engine, but it's not a public utility.
-CF