Marcia - 6:47 am on Sep 13, 2008 (gmt 0)

First off, there are patents (or patent applications) published that are pretty clear on ad quality guidelines. So someone asking for a manual exception is asking for individual editorial review of their site.

Comparing to business.com? Which is a human edited directory? Why not take a look at business.com's process for submission and acceptance of sites, which is a manual, human review:

[business.com...]

There's a link to the editorial guidelines,which is in a popup. But here's one of the bullet points of what is NOT to be submitted:

# Link-only sites or third party CPC ad resellers.

From the Times article:

Although the company never told Mr. Savage what, precisely, was wrong with his landing page quality, it offered some suggestions for improvement, including running fewer AdSense ads and manually typing in the addresses and phone numbers of the 600,000 companies in his directory

They DID tell him. They told him to do human review. That's what you have to do to manually type them in, and that's what business.com does - human review.

There's nothing monopolistic or unfair about that, it sounds perfectly kosher to me. IMHO Google was as helpful to him as they possibly could have been.