LA Times: Google has reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in a case concerning Canadian pharmacy ads on the search engine. Google will pay a $500 million fine, which represents the amount of money it made from the ads, plus the amount of profit the pharmacies made on the illegally imported drugs as a result.
The Justice Department claimed that the ads resulted in the illegal importation of drugs into the country, and that Google knew about the problem as early as 2003. For its part, Google said, “While we banned the advertising of prescription drugs in the U.S. by Canadian pharmacies some time ago, it’s obvious with hindsight that we shouldn’t have allowed these ads on Google in the first place.”
