Click Fraud Revisited

I just noticed this article on click fraud in Wired care of Boing and found a very odd thing – a moral argument for the rights of property holders:

By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet’s venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them – PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet’s fabulous cacophony of voices.

I don’t know how click fraud actually qualifies as fraud in the legal sense. I don’t know of a crime being committed or a contracual relationship being breached. The main example given in the story is one of extorsion, the threatening of Google with release of a autobot clickotron unless payment was made. Sadder still is the illustration of slogs – spam blogs – who exists only to generate traffic click throughs for a wee cheque:

Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere – and the search engines that index it – in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.

Imagine. Vacuous blogs created for alternative purpose. Whoda thunk it? The problem, of course, is the seduction of the technology generally and what it does to one’s thinking and one’s ethics. How much different is the new economic moral thinking compared to, say, actual legal regulations like copyright and the intellectual property of others. Is it because this clicky activity undermines the beloved as opposed to the actual rights of others? It is primarily the violation of the new moral crime against technological advance that is decried by Wired – we have a new plan that demands new thinking, new commerce and new crimes for the old thinkers…and we will tell you what the new thinking is after we get to it, thank you very much.

Isn’t the real problem the false valuation? Isn’t it incumbant on a firm presenting a new mode of advertising to prove its effectiveness in the marketplace as a mechanism for setting the price? Is it that the clicks are invalid or is it the mechanism which clicks which is. Isn’t the real question whether a click ad represents or ever represented value for money. Interesting to note that the one realistic alternative mentioned is micro-payments…about ten years after they were laughed away by the new think.