Thanks goodroi for getting this thread started.

Has anyone closely read these new TOS terms and closely compared them (you know, with an eye to detail) to what we all signed before?

I was looking out there on the 'net and found nothing.

Seems a little thorough review by some one in legal might be prudent.

Are there any once or currently active attys here at WebmasterWorld anymore?

is there anybody out there a'tall?

Most people just don't bother reading the legal terms for any company. Back in 2005, there was a company that put a notice in their legal terms that they would pay $1000 to the first person that actually read it. It took over 5 months for any user to read those legal terms, find the $1000 offer and claim it. Everyone else just clicked accept and skipped reading it.

Personally I like to use [diffchecker.com...] It lets you copy and paste text and will then highlight all removals & additions so you can quickly spot the differences between two versions. It is also helpful to compare old code to new code to see what has changed.

Nobody reads those things. 9/10 of the sites I work with that use Google Analytics and AdWords are not in compliance with their terms of service. There are specific things you have to say in your Privacy Policy and according to the TOS every user agrees to when signing up. Not even lawyer clients have been compliant.

These arbitration clauses can be challenged if pockets deep enough do so (think several millions of dollars against a corp like g) and usually pay out so little in return (enriching lawyers and nobody else) hence these clauses continue to survive.

Meanwhile, as long as the g teat continues to deliver ANYTHING AT ALL few are willing to expend either effort to do better or challenge what they are getting. Nature of the beast.

What will surprise some in the future is the increasing slant of these multi-national corps trying to survive, with NATIONS nipping at their heels, slipping and sliding into content censorship by inches, soon to be miles.... Advertising spend and/or income might become the least problem if on the wrong side of THAT algorithm.

Long and short, any TOS can be read any number of ways and no two lawyers will agree what one says, and most non-lawyers will go brain dead attempting to make sense of the verbiage.

The real takeaway from this report is that g will be the final arbiter of which sites/content qualify and the webmaster is not part of that testing/determination.

And Google will also count ghost conversions which are those conversions that Google estimates one should have but can't be accurately logged because of browser settings.

At the end of the day what matters are real conversions because it's those conversions that pay the bills, not an artificially inflated number by Google.

The Emperor has no clothes,

It does ring the bell that something is going on with the zombies in Adwords. Testing campaigns for days no to produce a conversion without informing the advertiser would be in the Terms and Conditions now...