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I 100% don't trust that Google can handle this situation. I actually hope that this practice increases drastically so that Google will be forced to do something about this. Because right now, Google will just ignore the problem and let small publishers and ad purchasers suffer. There is no real customer support so it will happen little by little and nothing will change. Google needs a swift, firm kick in the ass to fix this otherwise they will ignore it completely.

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I think the part of „Google will just ignore the problem“ is exactly what the scammers are counting on - knowing that their victims as well expect to be ignored.

I can't agree more. Google has some of the crappiest support around. A few lawsuits and some really bad publicity might make them change their tune.

"A few lawsuits" is an so much an understatement that it might as well be a lie. You'd need one out of every few (13.75) people in the USA to successfully bring a $5k lawsuit against Google to reduce them from highly profitable to break-even. Lawsuits and bad publicity only matter if they're more costly than ignoring the problem.

If the company in the article successfully sued for the $5,000 they were being extorted over that wouldn't even matter. A few of those lawsuits wouldn't matter. A few thousand of those lawsuits wouldn't even matter.

The European Commission last year issued a massive lawsuit against Google Adsense of $1.6 billion [1]. Google marked that EC fine down in its SEC filings on page 86 of their 10-K [2]. European Commission fees constitute an effective tax of 1.0% in 2019, which they add to various other factors for a total tax rate of 13.3%. Page 89 shows that Google revenue was $160B, while expenses were $40B.

Google isn't moral, they don't see this fine as a mistake to be learned from. It's an operating expense. They won't change their tune unless it's more profitable to do so.

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...

[2]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20200204_alphabet_10K.pd...

You don't need to sue Google enough to completely eat up their profits, you just need to sue them enough that it becomes cheaper for them to staff a better customer service department.

Google isn't moral, they don't see this fine as a mistake to be learned from. It's an operating expense. They won't change their tune unless it's more profitable to do so.

This is exactly how Microsoft grew evil.

yeah. bullets are mort apt than fines to change people behavior. bank notes do not protect from bullets.

What I'm seeing is industry is doing the same thing to them that they did to Intel. Encapsulate them in a cyst like the body does to a parasitic worm. Basically all of their non ad ventures will fail due customers reflexively choosing their competitors products. Just like no one will pick Intel as a vendor outside of their core products.

> A few lawsuits and some really bad publicity might make them change their tune.

I'm not sure about that. Google's crappy support is deeply, deeply embedded in their culture -- for all the benefits, it's one of the downsides of their PhD-heavy, engineering-first mentality, because engineers and academics loathe dealing with people, and to the extent that it's necessary for some system, regard that as a sign that system was improperly designed.

Google would need a major culture shift to start having good support, and unfortunately it's the exact kind of culture shift that would anger and alienate a lot of Googlers. Don't count on this changing anytime soon.

That's one lousy excuse for a corporation like Google. This has nothing to do with them being PhD-heavy or engineering-first? (what engineering-first are you referring to btw?) The reason for this is the nature of their business. It's a calculated decision by them in terms of how much is worth spending on support without taking an actual hit to their margins.

I agree. Google needs a formal, transparent process to dispute bans and investigate incidents. It hurts small publishers when their idiot machine learning algorithms issue bans with no recourse of action.

I once had a location-based file sharing website banned by Google -- all Chrome browsers would pop up a warning. It actually potentially could have been monetized but I lost all the users due to Google's unexplained ban.

I'm a pretty libertarian minded guy and I generally think the federal government is too big and bloated, but this is exactly where they are needed. They need to start throwing their weight at Google and telling them if they don't start reigning in this kind of shit, they're going to get regulated to high hell then broken up.

Google has shown time and again they do not care. I don't even know if they employ human support reps, I've never actually spoken to anyone who represents google other than recruiters.

I'm wondering from a theoretical perspective how large does a company need to be to effectively challenge the government? I know the USA government is a huge employer and holds vast quantities of stuff, but how large does a company have to get to compete with that? Is it the same size, is it only 50% of the size, is it something even smaller?

At what point in relative size is a company too large for the government to handle and the government has to go to war with it in order to keep power?

What do you mean by effectively challenge the government? Corporations challenge the government all the time. The power of the government is constrained by the constitution, and corporations have been recognized as having certain rights. The government does have the nuclear option though. Alphabet only exists because it was granted a corporate charter by the government in whatever state they incorporated in. The state can revoke its charter and the government can force them to liquidate their assets. It used to be a fairly common practice and still happens quite a bit too smaller corporations.

What I mean is how big does an organisation have to get to effectively challenge the sovereignty of the government. How big does it have to get (relative to the government size) that (threatening to or actually) revoking its charter won't mean anything because so many people are tied up in the corporation that it can just exert its own authority.

I.e. Is there a theoretical size in which the corporation (or effectively any other organisation) can just say "no" to the government?

I don't think any company of any size could just say no. No corporation has enough power to stand up to the government if the government is determined. They do have a lot of soft power to keep things from getting to that point. They can spend a lot of money to influence politicians and the public and apply pressure to the government to back down. Walmart, for example, has ~2.2 million employees. Even if Walmart did something egregious enough to have their charter revoked would you want to be the governor of the state that has to tell those 2.2 million people they don't have jobs tomorrow? Not to mention the enormous ripple effects that would have through the economy. I've seen a lot of people argue that what the banks did during the lead up to the financial crisis was egregious enough to warrant the corporate death penalty, but those institutions were so critical to the economy that they couldn't be shut down. So, in a sense, there are already quite a few companies that are too large for the government to effectively exercise it's power over.

I don't think there is a set number though. It probably depends a lot more on what the business does and how central it is to the health of the economy. It's the "too big to fail" debate, and at various times in the recent past, we have determined several automakers and financial institutions to fall into that category. I think if you are too big for the government to let you fail, you are too big for the government to try to shut you down.

This is what I don't get. If I was running a company and the gov't started sniffing around looking to rein me in, I'd be doing it myself.

If you wait until the gov't get involved, it's going to be a much more painful, slow, bureaucratic process and you'll probably end up in a far worse position than if you just self-corrected in the first place.

A good example are drug prices. If drug companies were smart, they'd find a compromise. If they wait for Washington to do, they're really not going to like the solution.

So, you're a libertarian right up to the point where your libertarian principles matter, and then you're just like everybody else.

The reason why the government is so 'big and bloated' is that your cut-off point for state intervention is >> than someone else who is less fortunate in the lottery of life. Think about that for a minute or two: would you be just as libertarian if you were say a single mom with three kids?

I try to stay apolitical on boards that I want to see nerd stuff on but if you're going to essentially invoke Rawls veil then please explain why policy based on that way of thinking tends to produce worse outcomes than intended or in the case of things like abortion simply cannot be resolved philosophically without resorting to stupidly broken arguments anyone can see through.

I'm a big empathy fan but defending the growth of state power on grounds of being shorted in the lottery of life pretty much always leads to more abuse and only temporary mitigation of suffering. Not to mention the fans of big government tend to be like alleged anti-violence people. They always seem to be fine with big government and using violence as long as it serves what they think is right. Then those same people either freak out on dirty cops and prosecutors or look the other way if those dirty cops and prosecutors are targeting people they hate.

We are so far from a free market state that any invocation of libertarian bent rings kind of hollow. The game is rigged and the safety net exists in one form or another in most places that would allow one the opportunity to post on a website instead looking after their basic survival. The issue now is not the lottery the issue now is trying to fix all the broken things that were allegedly created to help alleviate the effects of the lottery.

So, feel free to invoke 'principles' while banging on those more inclined to want liberty than safety but as someone who worked their way up from a worse start than just having a single mom the last thing I trust are people inclined to social engineering "looking out for me".

So because you made it despite the odds everyone else has to live or die in a Mad Max free-for-all?

That’s not how anything actually works in the real world though.

The arguments against libertarians are almost always some absolutist interpretation of some anarchist movie is world or worse Somalia which has tons of tribal systems, failed states (which includes a fair judicial system and enforcement of the law which markets absolutely depend on) and very little developed capitalist industries.

In reality most libertarians want a smaller government than is currently in place, they don’t want zero government. They most certainly don’t want an unstable state without centralize state run courts or law enforcement (outside of a very tiny extremist minority, a far smaller minority in the world than those who want actual vanguard communism again).

I’m a pragmatic libertarian leaning person which means that being realistic means compromise that some industry just simply makes more sense (as the amount of trouble it would cause to be market based via uncontrollable externalities). You could even factor in the amount of natural political meddling like we see in the US healthcare markets, which creates fake pseudo markets that provide few of the benefits of a real market where a single centralized public insurance option may actually be the least evil option, since the alternative has long ago become unrealistic. But that said I’d go as far as up to 50%+ up industry intervention and pro-social projects (ie helping the poor) are actually making things worse off overall had they not existed at all.

Thomas Sowell has written some great books documenting hundreds of cases of gov intervention coming with good intentions that have backfired (ie. rent control in Toronto and NYC in the 70s and 80s which dramatically reduced the supply of new low income development because no one wanted to build with rent control when they could build somewhere else).

I recommend “Wealth, Poverty, and Politics” by Sowell as a starter.

For other examples of failures of gov run central industry making them worse off than before I highly recommend reading the Venezuela economy Wikipedia about all the stuff they did after declaring capitalism is old and dead, creating mass starvation and unnecessary poverty in what could have been the most successful country in South America. Meanwhile countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong adopted markets after having large state run industry and dramatically increased the wealth of their entire country in a short few decades.

I 100% agree that there are horribly misguided policies pushed by many progressives that do more harm than good. An overly aggressive minimum wage would be devastating to underskilled or undervalued workers. Rent control is a disaster. Markets are an amazing tool, and few things are more dangerous than a bleeding heart progressive that doesn't understand markets.

But I believe markets are just one tool that a wise society employs to create a prosperous world where everyone has the basic necessities and access to resources to allow them to flourish.

Honestly, it sounds like you and I aren't too far apart.

"Libertarian" is a very broad label. Even more so when you consider left libertarianism, which people usually forget.

But, in any case, many libertarians are in favor of UBI, for example - the whole point of which is to solve the "lottery" problem without creating a bureaucratic monstrosity that is means-tested welfare.

Also libertarian minded....have you considered that in a natural state, businesses this large would be very hard to maintain? The fundamental business structure we have today is based around a government-sanctioned "personhood".

If you could strip this away, there would be no corporate veil, and you could sue the person who failed to act (or whom acted wrongly) and did you wrong. Think of bankers at Wells Fargo creating false accounts in customer names...hire investigator or do your own, sue, discover, repeat...there would be MUCH MORE downside to bad behavior, even if the upside is there.

I think personally that organizations like GORE would exist, and who knows what else might emerge...more co-ops?

Of course this does require 3rd-party alternate court systems (maybe like cert issuers, but held to the same liability standard above?)...our current system cannot handle this, so it may be largely academic thoughts.

If you can be sued into oblivion for even starting a business, who would try? The corporate veil is intended to help the little guy.

Until recently doctors and auditors weren't allowed to be limited-liability companies. There was still a ready supply of people willing to run those businesses as partnerships, with personal liability. There were good and bad firms, just not megascale conglomerates. The "liberalisation" of those rules didn't help the little guy, just the opposite: auditing became concentrated in a handful of giant companies, and quality predictably declined.

If you're doing oblivion-dollars damage to someone, why shouldn't you be accountable. Otherwise you're just making society pay the cost.

Between 36% and 53% of small businesses get sued every year according to this article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/basharubin...

If suits only happened when businesses actually did something that truly did damage to society, then I'd agree. But reality is far from this.

Lawsuits are part of doing business, just like taxes and accounting.

> have you considered that in a natural state

a natural state would not have technology.

I would also tend to be libertarian if technology didn't exist. Technology changes the game:

- you can process millions of transactions a minute without a bottle neck from humans

- you can produce plastic, and lots of it

- you can migrate hundreds of thousand of human around the world, which would normally be an invasion

- you can destroy the environment (not so easy without technology)

- you can addict an entire generation of humans to a device (video games, porn, social media)

Without technology there is only so much a person or organization can do.

They could just stop serving to small publishers and purchasers? Would that make you happy?

No, they should be regulated.

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