Australian Competition And Consumer Act Case Study

Australian Competition and Consumer act provides protection to most areas of the market that includes the relationship between such as seller and buyer. The main purpose of the act is to protect and provide the safest environment for Australian regarding the trade and competition. It broadly covers “Unfair market trading, Price Monitoring, Labelling, Product safety, Industry Codes” (ACCA).The well-known company Google got an assertion by the ACC states that some of the advertisements displayed by the Google conveyed misleading or misrepresentation and as a result, Google engaged in the conduct under the s52 of the trade practice act. Google said that these advertisements are not created by Google itself, they were made by the sponsor of Adwords

In most cases, Google has no control on the advertiser words, even the keywords provided in the advertisement also needed to get the authorisation by the advertiser. Google claimed that they did not create any of the scenes in the ads which has published by the sponsor link. And this the fact that known by most people. There were many facts could show that Google was not directly involved in the publication of these misleading ads (Justice). According to the High Court (Rosanne), Google was acting as an intermediaries the way that the same as many other social media applications does, such as Facebook and Twitter. The decision of the High court is more sensible and important in practical terms as it provides fair and clear assumption, it has top listed all the advertisers and the publisher to determine the one that is liable for the act of misleading and misrepresentation. In conclusion, Google was not involved in the creation of ads and which means Google has no involvement of any sort of misleading and misrepresentation

After a six-year legal battle, the Australia Consumer law finally recognised Google’s AdWords program as an innovation of online advertising. The final decision of the high court will have an impact on the online advertising industry. As for publishers in the online advertising industry, the high court decision indicates that Google is only a conduit between advertisers and customers to connect (David 2013). Google is to a certain extent like intermediaries such as broadcasters or newspaper publishers (Ian 2013). This decision provides a direction that if publishers do not add additional information which the advertiser has not provided or adopted the contents, they are not liable to customers. As for advertisers, the high court decision creates a clear liability distribution between Google and advertisers. This highlights that advertisers have responsibility to review their advertising materials cautiously to meet the relevant legal requirements under the Australian consumer law. As for consumers, due to Google cannot effectively control and suspect content regards to the linked sites, the risk of misleading or deceiving consumers is still exist, therefore an appeal is that the government should reform Australian consumer law to protect the rights of consumers properly. If the ‘sponsored links’ cause liability or loss, intermediates such as Google must provide a procedure to remove the