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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Both. It can be both.

Compare to food: it's like demanding that Walmart screen all the food itself to protect you and then you'd screech at Walmart and only Walmart for not making sure Keloggs cereal is healthy while letting the manufacturer off the hook with zero (I repeat, zero, none, null, NADA) consequences for fraud and damage they caused.

The way media, HNers and other people behave is creating a situation that's terrible to the extreme.

Now, do a thinking experiment: how did we ensure product quality in food/electronics/other parts that DID NOT hang on the fact that Walmart has 100% monopoly on all sales of those products and completely locks out you ability to go to any other store? How did we build a system that holds manufacturer of fradulent good accountable, not the megacorporation doing the distribution?

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Except Walmart has to follow certain standards to ensure the products it sells are legitimate. If they'd literally just accept products from random unmarked vans and put them up for sale, they'd be very much on the line if those products end up being unsafe.

Likewise you can't just sell stolen goods even if you don't know they're stolen. They'll be confiscated at best and you'll be charged for fencing stolen goods at worst.

Exactly. Where are those standards for software and content?

Remember that we punish the companies that build products against standards first, not just Walmart for stocking them. We also don't trust exclusively just Walmart to set and enforce food safety standards (because that would be problematic for competition wouldn't it)? We have independent standard bodies.

And right know we have NOTHING to beat Google (or Apple or anyone) on the head with because there's no standard or rule they've ignored when they allowed this ad to be published.

>> Except Walmart has to follow certain standards to ensure the products it sells are legitimate.

And so Walmart makes a solid effort to ensure they know who they are buying product from.

That's my point. Google can just take money from any random entity and let them run fraudulent ads and the worst that will happen is they have to shut down the ads and get to pocket the unspent money.

I love these analogies to retail markets, but one major difference keeps digital goods from behaving the same way: spoiled food is easy to identify by customers and changes their behavior, incentivizing the quality controls we have today.

Spoiled advertisements/news programs/blog spam are not easy to identify by _todays_ customers, and thus do not incentivize quality controls. I think the solution to todays attention problem is to meet the problem on the same battlefield; attention! If anyone has a clever idea to marry people w/o situational awareness to a flywheel that creates situational awareness lmk.

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