February Marks Beginning of Yahoo!, Google Civil Trials

It was recently reported that Hagen Berman Sobol Shapiro, the law firm in the Yahoo!, Google case, released a statement saying that the civil trial against the two companies will test the liability of both and ask the courts to further restrict their ability to produce similar actions in the future. The civil trial is scheduled to go to court on February 11th and was filed in California Superior Court in 2004.

It states the two companies and other websites made millions of dollars by advertisements of illegal online gambling on their search engine pages. The companies recently settled with the United States, who had filed federal charges, on December 19th. Both companies did not deny or admit to receiving payments from Internet gambling advertisers.

"We believe these companies have been profiting from this illegal practice for more than a decade, and we believe the agreement with the government does not go far enough," said Reed Kathrein, lead attorney in the case and partner at HBSS. "The settlements are a great victory and a tacit admission by these online advertisers, but there is still more work to do in holding these companies accountable for the harm they have done to Californians and to keep them and others from continuing these practices."

It is also believed by Kathrein that the price paid by both companies is small in comparison to what they made and will not change them from taking the same actions in the future. Kathrein will be on hand in February to argue his point.

Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft paid part of $31.5 million to the United States Department of Justice as a settlement. The largest amount paid was by Microsoft of $21 million. Yahoo! is set to pay $7.5 million and Google to pay $3 million.