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Someone else already said this it's not that hard they could simply do a manual review of ads, but that's obviously going to eat into their profits so they will

Someone else already said this it's not that hard they could simply do a manual review of ads, but that's obviously going to eat into their profits so they will not do it. I think this really requires governments to step in. I mean one could easily argue that Google is facilitating fraud here, so maybe they should be liable?

shadowgovt 4y ago
The notion that is not hard to review millions of advertisers does not align with reality.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  You could make the same argument about disposing of toxic waste (it's definitely cheaper and easier to just dump it in the river than to deal with the "reality" of processing millions of litres of sludge).
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I actually think the problems of dealing with toxic waste are far more tractable than the problems of vetting every ad in a network serving 30 billion impressions a day. Toxic waste doesn't try and hide from the litmus paper or the geiger counter.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Yet there is still a cost to dealing with toxic waste, which encourages companies to not make any more of it than necessary. There's currently no cost (it's all profit, in fact) to promoting malicious ads in search results, so why wouldn't Google do it? There is no reason they have to serve 30 billion impressions a day. If vetting takes that down to 1 billion, that's fine. Lower the volumes (and raise the prices to fund manual vetting) until the problem is resolved. Toxic waste disposal is a solved problem thanks to (enforced!) regulations that force companies to do so under threat of heavy penalties, not altruism or the fact that the waste doesn't hide from a Geiger counter. We need the same for online advertising.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        The cost is possibly losing trust in Google search. It's a pretty big cost, and one of the reasons Google invests so heavily in stopping bad ads.
        Nextgrid 4y ago
        There's no downside to losing trust as long as you have a monopoly and none of the alternatives are any better (and they are not - Bing, Yahoo, etc - all ad-funded search engines will have the exact same problem). But even if we accept that there is a downside, it's clearly not enough because this problem keeps happening again and again. Whatever downside there is needs to be increased by a few orders of magnitude for them to take the problem seriously.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        What monopoly do they have? DDG is right there, and better if their competition has a reputation for vending malware links.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Why would I care if this easy for Google? I'm saying that we need to provide a government led "incentive". If Google becomes financially (criminally?) liable for the damage they cause with fraudulent ads, they would quickly implement a way to solve the problem. If I you mean it's difficult to regulate for the government, why? They don't need to find the fraudulent ads, someone who has been affected just needs to provide evidence and get a ruling against Google for "hosting" it.
dylan604 4y ago
The problem with gov't regulation is that the pages have a good chance of not being within the jurisdiction of what ever gov't is trying to do the regulating. So unless someone like Uncle Sam is going to say that ISPs must not peer with known places, there's no way that blocking access to these out-of-jurisdiction pages can be stopped.

shadowgovt 4y ago

The notion that is not hard to review millions of advertisers does not align with reality.

Nextgrid 4y ago
You could make the same argument about disposing of toxic waste (it's definitely cheaper and easier to just dump it in the river than to deal with the "reality" of processing millions of litres of sludge).
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I actually think the problems of dealing with toxic waste are far more tractable than the problems of vetting every ad in a network serving 30 billion impressions a day. Toxic waste doesn't try and hide from the litmus paper or the geiger counter.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Yet there is still a cost to dealing with toxic waste, which encourages companies to not make any more of it than necessary. There's currently no cost (it's all profit, in fact) to promoting malicious ads in search results, so why wouldn't Google do it? There is no reason they have to serve 30 billion impressions a day. If vetting takes that down to 1 billion, that's fine. Lower the volumes (and raise the prices to fund manual vetting) until the problem is resolved. Toxic waste disposal is a solved problem thanks to (enforced!) regulations that force companies to do so under threat of heavy penalties, not altruism or the fact that the waste doesn't hide from a Geiger counter. We need the same for online advertising.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      The cost is possibly losing trust in Google search. It's a pretty big cost, and one of the reasons Google invests so heavily in stopping bad ads.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        There's no downside to losing trust as long as you have a monopoly and none of the alternatives are any better (and they are not - Bing, Yahoo, etc - all ad-funded search engines will have the exact same problem). But even if we accept that there is a downside, it's clearly not enough because this problem keeps happening again and again. Whatever downside there is needs to be increased by a few orders of magnitude for them to take the problem seriously.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        What monopoly do they have? DDG is right there, and better if their competition has a reputation for vending malware links.
cycomanic 4y ago
Why would I care if this easy for Google? I'm saying that we need to provide a government led "incentive". If Google becomes financially (criminally?) liable for the damage they cause with fraudulent ads, they would quickly implement a way to solve the problem. If I you mean it's difficult to regulate for the government, why? They don't need to find the fraudulent ads, someone who has been affected just needs to provide evidence and get a ruling against Google for "hosting" it.

dylan604 4y ago

The problem with gov't regulation is that the pages have a good chance of not being within the jurisdiction of what ever gov't is trying to do the regulating. So unless someone like Uncle Sam is going to say that ISPs must not peer with known places, there's no way that blocking access to these out-of-jurisdiction pages can be stopped.