Google has recently been nailed in two more scandals: cold calling ignorant Kenyans with a scam offer and scary lies about Google’s competitor, and vandalizing open source maps which competes with Google Maps.
While Google is wonderfully politically correct, and would never dream of suggesting that black people are stupid, the scam service they are selling in Kenya is predicated on the assumption that black people are stupid.
Mocality is a Kenyan business whose main asset is a database of Kenyan businesses, and a web service for looking up those businesses. It creates, for every Kenyan business it can find, a short web page, directly competing with Google advertising. Kenyans look up Mocality when they want to find a business, rather than googling.
Google call centers would look up businesses listed by Mocality, cold call them, and try to telemarket them Google’s hosting service.
Very few Kenyan businesses have the skills to create a web page, nor any compelling reason to acquire such skills when Mocality creates a web page free of charge for every Kenyan business, so they had no use for the hosting service that Google was selling.
So, part of the Google telemarketer script was that Mocality was supposedly going to charge businesses some extravagant fee for their listing, and that is why Kenyan businesses supposedly needed their own host and their own web page.
Crucial point is the final paragraph:
So, part of the Google telemarketer script was that Mocality was supposedly going to charge businesses some extravagant fee for their listing, and that is why Kenyan businesses supposedly needed their own host and their own web page.
That is fraud. So this behavior would not fall under legitimate competition.