mobster

You have the protection money, right? Photo by Lachlan Hardy via Flickr

I was scanning through some tech stories in my RSS reader when I came across an interesting story about Google. According to ReadWriteWeb, Google’s patent application on a method to place advertisements in online mapping applications like Google Street View was approved. The patent describes a system that would identify objects in images, such as buildings, billboards, posters in windows, etc and allow for the images on those objects to be digitally replaced with either advertising or a link. According to the patent filing, the advertisement could be for the property owner or sold to the highest bidder.

My Issue:
What worries me about this patent is the fact that Google could post advertisements on other people’s properties that those people/companies might not approve of. Let me give a couple examples. Say that McDonald’s had a sign on their property and Google decided to place an ad on it and auction it off to the highest bidder. What’s to stop PETA from purchasing that sign and placing something highly offensive and potentially damaging to McDonald’s business on that sign? Or what’s to stop Starbucks from posting an ad on an independent coffee shop that says something like, “For real coffee not made by dirty hippies, there’s a Starbucks just down the road.” (More likely it would just be a sign advertising a nearby Starbucks location.)

Now some people would say that McDonald’s could just purchase the ad from Google themselves. That’s true, but why should they have to? More importantly, why should the independent coffee shop have to do the same thing? It might not be big money, but I doubt the ad would bring the coffee shop any business from Street View, but they sure wouldn’t want to lose business because of it either. So, now they might be in the unenviable position of having to outbid a bigger rival, like Starbucks, to prevent a competitors advertisement from being posted on their shop. It’s almost like having to pay protection money to not have someone post signs all over your real store every day. If you pay the money, Google doesn’t send your business elsewhere. It would be the same as if Google allowed your competitor to buy your name as a keyword in Google AdWords, so that you would have to spend money to block that. Oh wait, Google does allow that. Maybe Google putting something like this patent into practice isn’t so farfetched, after all.

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