SYDNEY (AP) - Australia’s highest court has thrown out a ruling against Google Inc. that had found the Internet giant guilty of breaching trade law by hosting deceptive advertisements.
The High Court’s decision on Wednesday overturned a federal court ruling from April that Google had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct with four ads that appeared on its Google Australia website. The advertisers used the names of competitors as keywords to trigger their own ads appearing.
The federal court ruled this was likely to mislead people searching for information about those competitors. Google argued that it was not responsible for the content of the ads.
The High Court sided with Google, saying it merely published the ads.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission brought the case against Google. It had no immediate comment.
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