Q&A With AIT CEO Clarence Briggs

• By theWHIR.com , January 25, 2006

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Interview by Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

January 25, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In December of 2005, Web hosting provider AIT (ait.com) set out a very big challenge when it took over the lead in a class action lawsuit against search engine giant Google, one step in an even larger-scale battle against search engine click fraud in general. AIT's outspoken CEO Clarence Briggs feels strongly that Google is not doing enough to stop click fraud, and that the search engine company should be held accountable. In a conversation with the Web Host Industry Review, Briggs discusses the problem, the solution as he sees it and what he has committed to the case, and to the greater battle against click fraud.

Web Host Industry Review: What, specifically, do you hope to accomplish through the class-action suit against Google?

Clarence Briggs: I won't comment about the civil piece. I do believe that there will probably be a criminal piece to this. I wouldn't be surprised if there were legislation that emerged, but we shall see. My own personal view is that it is wrong. In the long run it hurts everybody.

I believe it is so pervasive that if something isn't done, and quickly, about click fraud, it is going to alter the Internet landscape, in respect to advertising. The number of domains and sites out there that are set up for the purpose of performing click fraud activities just boggles the mind. There are a lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of organizations involved in this. It's not just the large search engines. Quite frankly, it's a lot of the large hosting companies and domain registrars that are doing it. It's a lot of online publications.

Did you have any reservations about getting involved with a battle that could potentially require a lot of your attention for a long time?

CB: I had a lot of reservations going into it. There are all kinds of things I could be doing with my time, which includes spending more time with my own family. I've been doing this for 10 years and I've always run a clean business. There was an opportunity to look at this and pretend that it wasn't theft.

Essentially what is happening is the redistribution of wealth. [That wealth] from the companies with legitimate business models that are advertising online now is being redistributed to so-called affiliates through a broker network. And the broker network consists of not just the tier-1 and 2 search engines. A lot of the main registrars and hosting companies are doing it, and they know who they are.

Can you explain what, in this particular case, constitutes a fraudulent click?

CB: There are a couple different types of click fraud. First of all, there's what I call impression fraud, which is kind of a PPI paid per impression. Impression fraud is essentially running site advertising and driving up the number of impressions, page use and visitors, and representing that to advertisers as the true traffic that you're getting. It would be comparable for a paper or magazine saying, "here's our circulation."

And then there's PPC, which is pay per click advertising. That is slightly different because you have an advertiser that goes to an online broker (syndication, online newspaper). They'll take a no-charge in advertising - 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 5 bucks per click. They may charge 10 bucks for the advertiser pay per click, and they'll turn right around and pay their affiliates out a buck for every time they syndicate that advertiser's keyword.

There's a built in conflict of interest there. How can you make money off both the advertiser and the affiliate? How can you represent both the buyer and the seller in a real-estate transaction? How can you represent both the plaintiff and the defendant in a lawsuit? You cannot. It is impossible. And what it does is really creates conditions for theft. They call it fraud, but it's [really] theft.

What can search engines do to police that better?

CB: It's not rocket science. Who's on the [realtime spam black list]? Where are the known proxy services located? Let's just take those away. It's not a problem; anybody that runs a responsible network can do this.

There are two things. They can set up enough filters and mechanisms where they can prevent the fraud. Or two, there's just a different model. The whole PPC model may just not be a viable model. In other words, it may just not work because of the embedded conflict of interest. I find it ironic that any large ISP or search engine or broker will screen out the restricted block list with respect to spam. But those same RBLs, the same proxy servers, when it comes to PPC advertising they don't filter it out.

In one particular instance it's immoral, and in the other case it's not immoral. What a crock of shit. I think it's sad that there are a lot of domain registrars and hosting companies out there in our space that know exactly what's going on and they're facilitating it to some degree. A lot of these people go to church on Sunday mornings and they feel good about themselves; but from Monday through Saturday, they're stealing.

Despite some success in fighting, and legislating against, spam, it is still out there. Is click fraud another unsavory element of the Internet that is never going to go away?

CB: There's a big difference. It's kind of like the narcotics industry; do you handle it on the supply end, or do you handle it on the demand end, that is, where do you stop it? Spam has many origins, and the sender has the initiative. There's no two-party or three-party involvement with spam.

Click fraud is different because the origin of click fraud is more of an oligarchy, as opposed to a very decentralized situation like you would find with spam. With click fraud, there are only really few syndicates and search engines and everyone pulls from them.

With click fraud, you definitely have representation by what I call the "click broker." In this case, the brokers are attempting to represent both the buyer and seller, at the same time. Spam is always going to be there and there are tools there to reduce the spam. With spam there are a lot of motives, and it's very decentralized. Where as with click fraud, it's very centralized in comparison and there is only one motive.

What would happen to PPC advertising in general if search engines continue to turn a blind eye to click fraud?

CB: There's going to be confidence issues. If we don't figure out how to clean this mess up, then you're going to see the PPC model fail. I believe that it can be saved. Quite frankly, I think it's going to have to be regulated. As a businessman, I am not really pro-regulation of anything. But at some point - if it's with the telecommunications industry, healthcare, it doesn't really matter - regulation has to occur to protect consumers, and in this particular case, those consumers are advertisers.

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