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Online Casino Advertisement Case Continues
Advertisements for online casinos are a sensitive issue in the United States, and various entities (including the U.S. government) are pressuring Internet sites to remove such ads. In this vein, a California judge has allowed a private lawsuit against Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves and other Internet search engines to proceed to the evidence-gathering stage.
The action involves sponsored advertisements for online casinos which appear on the defendants' search result pages. Online gambling may be illegal in California, but the issue in the case is whether carrying advertisements for online casinos which are viewed by California residents should be prohibited.
The plaintiffs are two gamblers who say that they used sponsored links on the search engine sites to locate online casinos, where they gambled and lost money. The plaintiffs could clearly have found online casinos without using sponsored links on the search engine pages, in which case the search engines would not have received any payments (search engines get paid for each click on a sponsored link). Therefore the underlying issue really is whether search engines should be able to make money by actively advertising services which may be prohibited in certain states.
This lawsuit is part of the larger dispute over online gaming advertisements, and reflects the various issues faced by search engines when they display certain types of advertisements. One online casino has recently filed its own lawsuit claiming that online gambling advertisements are protected by the free speech rights found in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
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