That's a much more sensible approach than doing what you're suggesting—trying to catch specific instances of people doing something nefarious that makes them money. That just causes the people posting the ads to get more clever, such that it gets more and more costly to catch each instance. (That was helpful in the ReCAPTCHA case, since spammers were advancing computer vision techniques in the process. It's not a harnessable force in the general case.)
Now, the advertisers who only run these mal-ads will stick around and continue running them. They're also the ones who would fight tooth-and-nail to make their mal-ads more clever, instead of giving up and switching to regular ads; so they're exactly the ones Google will have a hard time discouraging at the ad-network level.
My hope for those is that other browsers simply copy Google's strategy here. If Chrome, Firefox, and IE all do this, there's pretty much no point in running these ads any more.
Yes, it's whack-a-mole, but so is SEO, and Google's continually tweaking that instead of giving up. Based on the current rudimentary techniques used by the advertisers (e.g. "DOWNLOAD!" buttons), even eliminating only such blatant examples would go a long way towards cleaning up deceptive ad's.
And as you've noted... it's not like Google doesn't have access to advanced CV techniques and the computational infrastructure to run them...
It has nothing to do with CV, it is not an engineering problem.
Not sure what you mean by this, given that there's a human with eyeballs on the other end of the bad ad and a limited number of keywords to trick that human into undesirable actions (virus,error,infected,download,update,install).
CV is exactly the solution you'd want to use for a first-pass categorization, given that's the pathway by which the ads communicate with users.
EDIT: I guess AdSense is involved with AdChoices somehow. My mistake.
The AdChoices icon is used by many ad networks, not just Google's, to indicate that there's per-user targeting happening. [1] But if you click on that "AdChoices" button and you get an AdSense help page.
The link from the ad is to https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net
I don't see how it can't be a Google-sold ad.
I suspect the reason that kind of ad is allowed (despite being deceptive IMHO) is that it's not just a download link. It also indicates that it's an ad for a driver update site (which makes it even shadier to my eye, but probably not violating any policies).
That post is from 2013. The answer to the question in the title is apparently "not for at least three years".
I'll take Google's concern about deceptive ads seriously when they stop serving those ads themselves.
Again, this is not a bad move. But I'm curious about the true motivations. If I were the MPAA, and trying to shut down the revenue stream of sites offering free streaming and torrents, this would be one of the ways to do it. That, or Google is simply sick of receiving takedown notices - and this is one method to take these sites out of their listings before even receiving the DMCA.
I would say it hasn't come from the MPAA or RIAA. These deceptive download buttons appear on a myriad of sites which are not related to streaming/torrenting.
There are also a lot of free file hosting sites with tons of those fake download buttons. Good luck downloading from them now.
But you could just right click and copy the ad link. The link would point to the ad network (e.g. googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk), but it would be better than nothing. Also, many ads include a domain, sometimes in a tooltip, and usually just the tld, but again, better than nothing.