From Reuters — The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by Lane’s Gifts earlier this year in an Arkansas state court and is designed to settle all outstanding claims against Google for fraud committed using its pay-per-click ad system back to 2002, it said.

This is certainly big news. I expect some bloggers and pundits are going to jump to the conclusion that this proves click fraud is a threat to Google & pay-per-click advertising’s future. Don’t read any more details into this story than are already there. To date, Google Adwords remains one of the best pay-per-click advertising programs on the internet when it comes to addressing fraud.