Claims Google unfairly promoted its own web properties.
Someone close do the domain name industry is getting lots of press today.
ShopCity, led by Colin Pape, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on November 11.
Pape has been in the domain industry for a while and even keynoted the Epik conference last year.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek is covering the story.
ShopCity says that Google unfairly used its control of search results to damage ShopCity.com, according to Bloomberg. The company complains that Google pushed it down in search rankings and favored its own competing service.
Google says the company — which had 8,000 domains for cities around the U.S. such as ShopPaloAlto.com and ShopCorona.com — violated its guidelines. It says the sites included duplicate and auto-generated content.
Marketing Pilgrim has an interesting take on the story.
page howe says
i think this avenue has merit, between restraint of trade, anti-competitive practices and unfair competition, we’ve thought of the same thing with respect to .TV, and google extending its monopoly in search to favor its youtube brand over .tv sites and other video sites
page howe
dnstore.tv
Official Domainer Club of America says
We are voting today to have Colin’s domainer card revoked
Isaac says
Google controls every facet of the domain industry. We are helpless to their world order.
steve says
You can’t fight Google. Their lawyers are to good. This is futile and even if the government files suit it won’t be for this guy. Google has guidelines that describe their service and just because they are #1 doesn’t mean they can’t have guidelines.
Some claim they are to stringent. If he can prove they knocked him and others off to show their own ads then he might have some merit.
Sarah says
Colin is a hypocrite. His shopcity.com website pushed local business owners own company website to bottom of search page even if the business purchased a site page from his shopcity site. He also charged local non profit downtown business district 5K for a website that he was never around to complete.
After the the merchant association completed their website with new logo and after the Manager during this period left he manipulated the new board of directors to redo website and logo to mirror his shopcity branding going against the very purpose of what makes a downtown different from shopping malls etc…
Colin is nothing other than a failed serial entrepreneur trying to make a name for himself (ie trying to sue google)instead of actually doing any good. All his businesses have failed . He is not even worth listening to. Just another egomaniac who like attention!!!!!!