April 1, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Fayetteville Observer (fayobserver.com) parent company, Fayetteville Publishing, filed a libel lawsuit last week against Fayetteville-based Web hosting provider Advanced Internet Technologies (ait.com) and its CEO Clarence Briggs.
Also named in the lawsuit as defendants are IGeryon, also headed by Briggs, as well as Click Defense and its CEO Scott Boyenger.
FPC says the companies and executives hurt the paper’s reputation with accusations that Fayetteville falsely overstated its website viewer and ad-click statistics in an attempt to mislead advertisers.
The lawsuit says the defendants distributed these statements through news releases and comments on the IGeryon and Click Defense sites and other sites to damage Fayetteville Publishing and promote its own products.
Last September, AIT filed a libel lawsuit against FPC and its reporter, Paul Woolverton, as well as several John Does. The suit alleged that Woolverton wrote false and defamatory statements about AIT and its employees posted via the websites aitsucks.com and aitsucks.net. The company dropped the suit in January.
This is the latest in a drawn-out feud between AIT and the newspaper, which began in 2006 with FPC suing AIT. The newspaper, which had hired AIT to host the servers used to operate its websites, sued to have computer equipment returned from AIT.
AIT countersued, saying the computer equipment had evidence of fraud. The computers were eventually returned to the paper and the countersuit was dismissed. AIT is currently appealing the decision.
When asked about the lawsuit on Monday, Briggs said it will help AIT.
“The bottom line is you guys committed click-fraud and now you’re giving us the opportunity to prove it, so there must be a lot of worried people at FPC,” Briggs told the Fay Observer .
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