Re: Excellent
No, it won't. The money goes where the users are. The users are on YouTube.
You're forgetting the laws covering the funding of terrorism. Basically it is illegal to put money into a terrorist cause.
Now, whilst a big advertiser can probably argue that it's Google's job to prevent their fee being directed to some jihadist's pocket, Google aren't doing that. Indeed, Google have been criticised by Parliament and Government for not doing it.
That casts a serious degree of uncertainty as to whether or not an advertiser making a defence in court "it's Google's responsibility" against a charge of funding terrorism. OK, that may sound ridiculous today, but Parliament is clearly heading in a direction towards advertisers being held responsible. What they have expressed recently as a moral obligation could, at a stroke of a civil servant's keyboard and Her Majesty's pen, become law.
The whole episode shows just how stunningly naive or cynical Google, Twitter and Facebook are being concerning the unsuitability of their American practises to doing business elsewhere. They are used to lobbying being effective in the US. It's far less affective elsewhere, especially in Europe.
Criminal Responsibility
It's like they're saying "you can't make us responsible for our content". The UK and Europe are very close to saying, "Well, let's see about that". Making Google's, Twitter's and Facebook's advertising customers criminally responsible for where their money ends up would do it just fine.
Such a result would probably kill advertising funded services outside the US. We'd be heading back towards the old (and successful) Compuserve model. With a paid subscription there is a strong identity trail between a user and their account, strong enough for criminal responsibility to be assigned quickly and easily to the user.
Personally speaking I think that'd be a good idea. Every wage earner in the UK is currently spending approx £150 per year via the price of goods in the shops to pay for online advertising (it's about £7billion per year). I'd quite happily pay that to get subscription mapping and search services that are guaranteed to have no adverts whatsoever, with no data slurp.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
