zlacker

>>yuvada+(OP)
"Company which makes its money from advertising bans automated click fraud extension from being used in its browser."

>>nimbix+K8
Not that I'm really surprised by Google's action, but "fraud" is a pretty strong word for what's happening, and pretty disingenuous IMO. No one's pretending to be anyone they're not.

>>acobst+ue
On their FAQ page AdNauseum reproduce the following definition of click fraud to argue they're not engaging in it:

The practice of ... clicking on an advertisement hosted on a website with the intention of ... draining revenue from the advertiser

Elsewhere on the same page they've even gone to the extent of explaining how they calculate the average revenue they think each simulated click drains from the entities they wish to "resist"

>>notaha+Fi
The difference is that in the classical definition, the revenue is drained from the advertiser to the click fraudster. That's an obvious and prohibited motive for traditional fraud.

In AdNauseum's implementation, the revenue is drained from the advertisers to all of the sites where those ads are hosted and where AdNauseum's users browse. Neither AdNauseum nor the users browsing the sites benefit from that revenue. Instead, the advertiser's marketing budget is slightly less effective.

This changes the behavior from an intent to profit to an intent to harm. I'm certain that they could prove in court that they do not intend to profit from this activity. But I don't know whether or not the court would classify the outcome of the activity as "resistance" or "harm".

>>LeifCa+2o
The classical definition AdNauseum reproduced regarded it as fraud if it was to generate revenue or to drain revenue. Wikipedia uses the even more straightforward definition: "Fraud occurs when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser, clicking on such an ad without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link"

Regardless of what a court may decide if it ever gets involved, the term "click fraud" as its most widely used and defined certainly includes clicks aimed at causing a party to lose money as well as than clicks aimed at directly obtaining money.