I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.
All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.
And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.
Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.
My reasoning is:
Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.
They built the half that allows anyone with the money to put something on their platform. They didn't build the half that makes sure that they're not helping scammers, con artists, and outright criminals from reaching the global audience that their wonderful, profitable, scalable platform enables.
They should be policing it on their own to an extent that obvious scams and fake banking websites and clickbait should be detected. Even just to appear to not be a crime-facilitation platform, which they currently are.
To me it feels analogous to Microsoft and their commitment to security of Windows. It's not a priority because it's counter to profitability. Privatise the profits and socialise the costs.
If they can't control their own platform, they should not have the platform. It is not a mature enough product to be released upon the world. It is Frankenstein's monster, left to roam.
I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Which three letter agency said that an ad blocker was a required layer of security when browsing the web? There's a good reason: Google. If the Internet is full of scams, who is most responsible for its proliferation?
(I have a massive bias against advertising, so that heavily colours my opinion. I also understand that advertising is inevitable, but it should be held to a much higher standard than, well, the none that exists)
Google has enough of a near-monopoly in ads that there aren't rivals scaled enough to defend the public good out of the greed of their pocket books if not the good of everyone else. Google's competitors are too busy selling ad space to the same and similar lowest common denominator polluters and scammers than to police Google enough to hope to put it out of business.
The FCC gave up on policing anything on the internet ages ago. Between Congressional protections and multiple administrations trying to keep the FCC weak, it doesn't seem to have enough power to do anything towards Google.
I suppose that leaves consumer advocacy groups. I don't know how we build and scale a Consumers Against Predatory Google Ads to the point that it can force Google to reconsider their approach to advertising for the consumer good instead of evil. But then I also don't understand how Google isn't already doing tremendous enough damage to their brand that there isn't already enough of a sentiment that Google is actively engaged in evil and needs to stop, five or six years ago at least (or maybe at least as far back as when Google bought/merged Doubleclick). Their brand, too, seems too big to fail at this point, and it is weird to me.
Baked into this is the assumption that the "responsible, difficult half" is something that they, rather than law enforcement, should be doing to begin with. Which they can't do effectively because they don't have the ability to impose significant penalties and we certainly don't want to give them that.
Consider how this is even supposed to work. There is often no conclusive way to tell ex ante whether some website is a scam; the premise of them is to look like a real site. Google doesn't know if it's a scammer or some third party contractor who has be commissioned by the actual entity to set up a new site, and real sites are often full of bad UI choices and weird bugs, or open up to nothing more than a login page which the ad network has no credentials to get past.
The way this works with actual law enforcement is that someone suspects a site of being a scam, or a victim files a police report, and then officers investigate. They spend significant resources to figure out if it's actually a scam or just e.g. a competitor trying to have their competition removed from visibility. They have special powers to conduct searches with probable cause. And then if it is a scam, they arrest the scammers, and if it's a false report, they charge that person for filing a false police report, which are necessary in order to provide a deterrent and prevent both of those misbehaviors from proliferating.
Otherwise you get untold numbers of false reports from people trying to grief their rivals, it takes just as much work to do a thorough investigation for each one, and then even if you catch the actual scammers, they just immediately reappear under a different name.
So then they get zillions of reports, many of them fraudulent, and you're proposing to put them in jail if they ever fail to do something they there is no apparent way for them to consistently do.
> I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Consider how this would apply to anything other than advertising. Some bank robbers buy Halloween masks to hide their faces. Drug dealers sell drugs over the internet and a normal mail/package carrier delivers the packages. A hitman rides the bus on the way to a hit. These are felonies! But we don't expect UPS to cut open everyone's packages or the bus driver to strip search every passenger to check for a vial of polonium, and punish them if they ever fail, because that isn't their job. They're not the police.
How would you feel about your local tv station(as if that was a thing anymore) running an ad for senior citizens to invest in free energy generators to reduce their electricity bills?
There are so many blatant scams on Google’s platform that it is simply inexcusable. They are structurally unable to solve it because they have built a business out of being structurally unable to solve it.
That’s like saying that a wildly unsafe amusement park that allows just anyone to come in and set up whatever they want and charge for it is “structurally unable to protect their customers from harm” should just be allowed to keep throwing kids down a cliff in potato sacks just because someone figured out how to make money doing it.
There is no way for me to legally penalize some company in Croatia trying to trick people into paying 600 dollars for access to “free energy from the ground that they can sell to their neighbors”.
In the age of LLMs there is no way you can tell me that they can’t detect these kinds of scam advertisements , or that they can’t detect that country.gov.it.me isn’t probably not an official government site.
If they can’t, they should be put out of business, because they are a public nuisance at best.
They don’t do anything about it because they make money from having no ethical standards for the businesses they promote. No normal business is allowed to operate with a reckless disregard for the harms that they create.
Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
