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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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThere'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 agoWhat monopoly do they have? DDG is right there, and better if their competition has a reputation for vending malware links.