4 ms·

What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers? What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?

• phoric 8mo ago
  Google wants you to use it. If it blacklists excess domains that hold legitimate sites, their product gets worse. If they blacklist illegitimate sites, their product gets better.
  • lazide 8mo ago
    Same as for those antiviruses.
  • cwnyth 8mo ago
    This argument would hold more weight if Google didn't have a history of making their own products worse and then getting rid of them.
  • zenapollo 8mo ago
    Cute. That is the commenter’s whole point about monopolies. Google is on record making their product worse to squeeze revenue. We’ve been living in the enshitification economy.
    • simsla 8mo ago
      There is a financial incentive to make the search results worse. (More searches, more ads, more money.) There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.
      • crote 8mo ago
        Sure, until their "smart filters" start considering GCP-hosted websites as pre-verified and small self-hosted websites as malicious. You know, like they have been doing with email? Chrome is big enough that a website owner can't afford a false positive on their malware list, just like they can't afford to have all their email end up in spam for all Gmail users. Due to their near-monopoly Google also has no incentive to avoid adding false positives to their blocklist - provided they don't accidentally block high-profile targets. And if a CxO is screaming over your shoulder that your website has been blocked, arguments about "false positives" aren't very compelling: they'll just demand you move off the "shitty basement provider" and switch to "proper hosting, like the Google Cloud"...
    • squeefers 8mo ago
      > We’ve been living in the enshitification economy. that whiny bullshit about somebody elses website? you dont have to rely on a website or app. either you need their monopoly because you cant do it yourself, or you have options.... in both cases the whining is not needed
• jeroenhd 8mo ago
  Google doesn't sell their list to you. They give it to you for free. Using their list costs them money. Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive. Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer. The incentives are different.
  • Macha 8mo ago
    Not true. Commercial or large scale use requires you to use their Web Risk API instead which is a paid service
  • crote 8mo ago
    Step 1: Get everyone to use your free internet filter Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful". Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter. Step 4: Profit! The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?
    • encom 8mo ago
      >pretty successfully with email Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad. EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.
    • jeroenhd 8mo ago
      > Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful". Yeah, sounds like a great cartel idea, if they actually did that. None of my domains ever got marked as potentially harmful, even the one that I bought as a joke because it would be so easy to turn it into a phishing site. Not everything is a big conspiracy to oppress the population. We hear about the cases where it goes wrong because the HN front page is the fastest way to reach the single part-time support person Google seems to employ.
• thesuitonym 8mo ago
  Nothing, but they haven't done it so far, and they don't really have any incentive to do so. It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.
• bonestamp2 8mo ago
  Nobody sees Google's numbers except Google... in other words, the numbers are not a sales tool for Google like they are for anti-virus/blocking companies. So, there's no reason for Google to pump up their numbers, it would just be extra work to make their product worse which wouldn't make sense.