I've been on the phone with clients crying because the competition is running them out of business, at $20,000 and $30,000 a month, by continually clicking their ads.

Search engines are no longer giving up log data.

Everyone in this industry agrees click fraud exists, and everybody agrees that advertisers should not be billed for it. At the end of the day, the question becomes 'what constitutes a fraudulent click, and who works to determine that?' Up until this point, it's been the search engines making the determination without using the data on the advertiser's side.

In some ways I think [this case] is a really good first step toward industry-wide acknowledgement that the click-fraud issue is a legitimate one. But does [this settlement] mollify the problem? No. It doesn't make any of the worries go away.