After an announcement in May, Google is putting its ban on promoting payday loans into effect this week. The ban will globally stop the acceptance and display of any adverts that promote loans requiring a repayment time of less than 60 days. It will also stop the promotion of any loans with an interest rate above 35%, although this will only affect marketers in the US for the time being. In addition to new ads no longer being accepted by the search engine, Google will also spend the next few weeks removing any current adverts that break the new rules as well. Meanwhile, the black-listing of these adverts has been criticised by some commenters for being a form of censorship, with Philip Johns, chief executive of the National Credit Providers Association in Australia, saying that Google had “let the industry down badly”.
