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Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

But why isn't google.com blocked? I see no reason to accept any rationales that don't apply to themselves.

For the same reason why Dropbox and One Drive and GitHub and Facebook and all the other big services don't get blocked: because they're big enough and well-known enough as content hosters that the default assumption is that they have a bad user rather than that Microsoft went rogue.

It's not fair to smaller and newer players, but it's perfectly rational and isn't a uniquely special feature of Google.

Correct, but the whole point of a rhetorical question is that everyone already knows the answer, and anyone who would try to defend the invalid argument would not be able to answer the question in any way that supports the invalid argument, such as whatever excuse google or a google apologist might try to give for the double standard exposed in this case.

Because google drive is in the PublicSuffixList and listed as a hosting provider is my guess.

I checked on this and that's not true. The public suffix list applies to anyone who lets out subdomains anyways and google drive is not a service to which this applies. Blogspot on the other hand is in the list.

Why _would_ they block themselves? How would that be to their advantage?

Irrelevant. Google does something and gives a rationale for it.

If that rationale were valid, it would apply to everyone, including google.

If the rationale does not apply to google, then it does not apply to anyone else.

Please gooogle (if they let you) the concept "double standard".

My point is not whether the rationale is valid or invalid: the point is, they're not going to do it. Is that wrong, in the ethical sense? Quite possibly. Do they care? No.

Try googling the "Golden Rule" and you'll find a version that says "they who have the gold make the rules".

You had no point. Obviously the reason anyone applies a double standard is to advantage themselves. Congratulations on that insight. Can you next explain why anyone would steal?

Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted to have a discussion, I wasn't clear on the fact that you just want to be a condescending dick. Have a nice life.

The rationale does apply to everyone: "if you're a big enough content hoster that we've heard of you before, we'll reach out to you rather than blocking your domain immediately". Google doesn't just make an exception for themselves, it also makes an exception for Microsoft, Dropbox, Box, Facebook, and probably hundreds of others that are too small for me to know about.

We can argue about whether this is fair to small players, but it's hardly self-dealing for Google to include themselves in their list of high-profile content hosters, and there are very rational reasons for maintaining such a list.

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