Google Seeking to Cut Funding to Piracy Sites?

In a brief and maddeningly vague article published over the weekend, The Telegraph reports that Google is in discussions with air max 95 pas cher VISA, Mastercard and PayPal seeking ways to cut off funding to “illegal download websites.”

According to the Telegraph‘s Katherine Rushton:

Executives want to stop websites more or less dedicated to offering links to pirated films, music and books from making money out of the illegal material. The plans, still in discussion, would also block funding to websites that do not respond to legal challenges, for example because they are offshore.

The article offers very little detail about the talks (no word of who is involved from each company, where and when these talks are taking place, etc.) so while it’s tempting to consider this a good sign, it’s very difficult to say how much promise these talks hold, or how the desired cutting off of funds would work.

It’s also important to note, as adland.tv does, that where Google’s own payouts to Adsense publishers are concerned, such payments are not dependent on VISA, Mastercard or PayPal, and the same can be said of many other online ad networks. As such, it’s hard to say how much impact VISA, Mastercard and PayPal could have on advertising revenues made by illicit sites, but they could certainly put a dent in the ability of such sites to sell ‘premium memberships’ and the like, purchases that often do require a credit card or PayPal account.

I tend to take just about any news that Google is going to do more to combat online piracy as good news, but in the last year I’ve also begun to take such news with a grain of salt. For instance, I’m still waiting for definitive evidence that another of Google’s announced anti-piracy measures, lowering the search result rankings of sites that receive a high volume of DMCA take down notices, has actually been put into effect.

To cite one example that suggests not much has been done in terms of Google punishing known pirate sites, according to the Google Transparency Report, Google has received requests to remove a total of over 99,000 URLS originating at filestube.com from its search engine responses in the last week alone, yet the site still appears in the first page of responses for quite a number of searches relating to copyrighted materials, including the phrase “the black keys free download.” (Filestube itself helpfully provides over 5000 links in response to that same search phrase.)

You know that they say, Google: talk is cheap. Heck, I’ll bet if I search around enough using your site, I can find hundreds of places where it’s absolutely free!http://www.airmaxfrance2015.com/