Congress To Regulate Online Ads; Tomorrow SEO?

I don’t know about you but I’m getting totally sucked in to Congress’ recent interest in Web privacy. In case you haven’t been following, on August 1, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters ordering 33 cable and Internet companies, including some of your favorite search engines, to explain their privacy standards and what information they’re collecting from users for monitoring purposes.

And now that the results are coming in, we’re all gathered around in fear waiting for someone to come and pick poor Congress off the floor. I think its head just exploded. IT seems online advertising isn’t made up of as many unicorns, bunnies and rainbows as Congress initially thought.

Seriously, Congress seems just a bit too surprised with the information being reported, deciding that it’s time for some rules and regulations to be applied to Web advertising. Edward J. Markey went as far as to say he would like to introduce an online-privacy Bill of Rights some time next year that would require companies to include an opt-in tracking policy that explained what information they were collecting and how it would be used.

Amen and hallelujah!

So what is Congress all worked up about?

Well, they didn’t seem to like that companies like broadband providers Cable One and Knowlogy admitted to using deep-packet inspection in trials without first informing users. They also didn’t seem to be aware that the reasoning behind Google’s DoubleClick acquisition was so that they could track users with the hopes of serving better ads. Methinks Congress should start reading Search Engine Land, with a dash of our Friday Recaps.

In Google’s letter to Congress, they admitted that had been doing some testing with DoubleClick recently, knowing that Congress likely read Google’s recent blog post touting that they can see the number of people who have seen an ad campaign and how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. However, they tried to clean off their halo by being adamant that they do NOT use deep-packet inspection like some of those other bad companies do.

Well, of course you don’t Google. You don’t have to because you already know more about Web users than anyone else in the world. You’re the biggest search engine on the Web, getting information from Google Analytics, AdSense, and a host of other services. You don’t get an (edible) cookie when you have that entire data treasure chest to work from.

I’m glad to see Congress getting more involved with online advertising practices, maybe it’ll wake companies up that at least some body of law is watching. If you’re going to use behavioral targeting, make sure you’re upfront about it and that you make it easy for users to opt-out if they don’t want it. When companies don’t do that and make it difficult for consumers to know what information is being tracked, it sours everything. Interestingly, according to the Washington Post article, some small businesses claim that if Congress institutes a law making opt-in a requirement for targeting it will hurt their ability to learn about their customers. Please, people! Find another way than being deceitful. That argument sounds nothing more than a child angry that his father is taking away toys he shouldn’t have been playing with in the first place.

As interesting as it is to watch Congress get up in Google’s face, I think the reason I’m so enthralled in this whole fight is because I’m looking bigger. It’s an excellent example of what happens when an industry doesn’t set standards for itself and goes unregulated for too long. In case you didn’t get the memo, search engine optimization is also a form of online advertising. We’re looking at our future here. You can fight that SEO doesn’t need standards and that you don’t want someone telling you how to optimize a Web site, but it’s coming. SEO is advertising and advertising needs to be regulated, just like Google and the others are finding out now. If we’re not proactive about outlining what we do, it’s not going to be long before Congress comes knocking and does the same thing to us that they’re doing to Google. Enjoy your wild west of spamming now.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

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