jhood - 10:47 pm on Apr 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

My site has thousands of pages of consumer product reviews, safety recall notices and consumer news articles , nearly all of them negative.

Many of the AdSense ads are, indeed, for the products excoriated on our pages. So what? There are also ads for competing products and even from lawyers trying to drum up plaintiffs for lawsuits against those products. Again, so what?

The ads give the criticized products what might be called "equal time."

By the logic expressed in some of the earlier comments, a TV news show that includes news about a damaging Vioxx verdict wouldn't run ads for Merck.

The whole idea of the First Amendment and the Web is that it is a "free marketplace of ideas" where the truth emerges for those willing to search for it. We've been doing it that way for a few hundred years in the U.S. Why stop now?