>It would be hosting providers jobs to police the content of their hosters.

this breaks down because there are friendly jurisdictions and/or hosting companies to bad actors. see "bulletproof hosting" for instance.

Do you know how many sites would be absolute minefields without google? They incentivise websites to commit to some clean standard so that the 'individual user' doesn't have to run a script every time they visit a website to make sure it's clean. And guess what: whatever script they run will just end up becoming a different google anyway.

Embrace the centralization.

We have enough history to know users can't self-police. This doesn't scale. Most users don't understand the internet nearly well enough to shoulder that burden.

At least in the Bay the police can't even stay in the confines of the laws they're sworn to uphold (stop signs, speed limits, not drunkenly swerving into the bike lane I'm inhabiting, ...). What reason do we have to believe they'd handle an unfamiliar problem domain with any better proficiency?

Police take reports from victims then what? How do police protect you from a site hosted outside their jurisdiction?

I think tech companies deciding what people can access is the most likely endgame no matter what. People will demand protection. Whether it's a great firewall, a whitelist-only internet, ...or just automated filtering like this, which may be the most liberal option we can realistically expect.

I trust them even less than Google, and I don't trust Google