Google to pay $100 million to settle 14-year-old advertising lawsuit

Google will pay $100 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of charging for clicks on ads placed outside the geographic locations selected by advertisers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The proposed settlement was filed in a California court on Thursday and still requires approval by a judge.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2011, centers around Google Adwords — now called Google Ads — and claimed Google broke California’s Unfair Competition law by misleading advertisers about the locations it would show their ads. It also alleged Google didn’t follow through on its promise to provide “Smart Pricing” discounts.

“This case was about ad product features we changed over a decade ago and we’re pleased it’s resolved,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in an emailed statement to The Verge.

Google has even bigger legal challenges with a federal antitrust lawsuit that could force it to sell Chrome. It also faced trial over the DOJ’s other lawsuit that accused it of creating a monopoly in the advertising technology industry.

The settlement comes after “extensive” fact discovery, which counsel for the plaintiffs say involved reviewing more than 910,000 pages of documents and “multiple terabytes” of click data from Google. The class includes advertisers who used Google’s AdWords program between June 1, 2009 and December 13, 2012.