Google’s headquarters in San Francisco: By Glynn Wilson
Sundar Pichai
Alphabet-Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
To whom it may concern:
Now that a federal judge has ruled you guilty of engaging in monopolistic corporate practices in regards to search and online advertising, we wonder if you might consider our small claim against your company without having to resort to the courts.
As you know we began using your online advertising platform Google Adsense Ads as early as 2005, when after several years of writing for newspapers such as The New York Times I went independent on the web and began publishing The Locust Fork News Journal at blog.locustfork.net. We built up the audience for news over the years and finally reached one million monthly visitors in about 2010.
In 2014, I took what I learned about web news publishing and launched a new publication in Washington, D.C. called the New American Journal at NewAmericanJournal.Net. By the fall of 2016, we reached two million visitors a month, with about a half a million page views a month or more.
We also had Google ads on YouTube videos beginning in 2010 when we covered the BP Gulf Oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Your company was paying us a small amount for the combination of Adsense ads on the website and YouTube videos, until The Washington Post botched the first “fake news” story in 2016. Reacting to the scandal, your company stopped supporting Google ads on small independent company websites and YouTube channels with less than 1,000 subscribers. So even the small payments we were receiving, under $150 a month, completely stopped at that point, even though our traffic for online news continued to grow to more than two million visitors a month in 2017 with nearly one million page views a month.
We have the raw traffic logs saved down from Host Monster and can prove this if necessary in court.
By my calculation, if you had paid an honest rate of just .02 cents per page view over a 10-year period, instead of your .01 penny a click rate, we should have been making about $20,000 a month – instead you paid ZERO for those ads, which were seen on our pages by millions of readers.
Now you have $180 billion in the bank in cash on hand, and we are virtually penniless and on the verge of going out of business. If this fair trade?
In addition, in February 2024, your company totally abandoned supporting the Google Adsense ad code on millions of news websites and pages without so much as an email of notification. As a result, our website and many others were hacked through that code and caused our news company irreparable harm. We had to manually go through hundreds of news stories to remove the code. This cost us countless hours and much pain and suffering. At that point we abandoned your ad platform completely and determined that it was a total corporate ripoff.
While you were charging customers millions of dollars for those ads, you paid those of us running the ads on our websites NOTHING!
Now all I am asking is that you make good on your promises in the early days when we started using your products and pay us what you owe us. We will settle for an average of $20,000 a month over 10 years, or $2,400,000.00.
Now in addition to this harm, your Artificial Intelligence company has now stolen our entire archive from both sites to train your bots, and you have paid nothing for this. So in addition, we are asking for $1 million for that theft.
That’s only $3.4 million out of $1.8 billion you have in the bank. Is that too much to ask? If the case went to court, we would be entitled to treble damages and court costs. That could come to three times that amount, or $10.2 million plus legal fees.
There was much talk in the early days of A.I. about providing some guaranteed minimum income for those of us harmed by your company practices in building these A.I. tools. This is what we are asking for to allow us to retire with some dignity and comfort. We are now starting a low power FM community non-profit radio station in Coulterville, California and starting a literary program to help poor people learn to read. This is how we will use the money.
You can certainly afford to help in this endeaver. Will you not come to our aid in this time of dire need? If not, why would the American people continue to support your greedy company? Are you heartless, selfish corporate bastards?
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Glynn Wilson
Editor & Publisher
New American Journal
NewAmericanJournal.Net
https://www.newamericanjournal.net/
Station Manager/News Director
Yosemite Radio
KNHA-LPFM 100.9
Operation New Earth
5016 Main Street
P.O. Box 166
Coulterville, CA 95311
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