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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

"Google does good thing, therefore Google has too much power over the internet" is not a convincing point to make.

This safety feature saves a nontrivial number of people from life-changing mistakes. Yes we publishers have to take extra care. Hard to see a negative here.

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I respectfully disagree with your premise. In this specific case, yes, "Google does good thing" in a sense. That is not why I'm saying Google has too much power. "Too much" is relative and whether they do good or bad debatable, of course, but it's hard to argue that they don't have a gigantic influence on the whole internet, no? :)

Helping people avoid potentially devastating mistakes is of course a good thing.

You're not wrong. You just picked a poor example which illustrates the opposite of the point you're making.

Fair enough! :)

What point are you trying to make here? You hosted phishing sites on your primary domain, which was then flagged as unsafe. You chose not to use the tools that would have marked those sites as belonging to individual users, and the system worked as designed.

Please note that this tool (PSL) is not available until you have a significant user base. Which probably means a significant amount of spam as well.

Where'd you see/hear that? It hasn't been my experience at least - but maybe I've just been lucky or undercounting the sites.

There are required steps to follow but none are "have x users" or "see a lot of spam". It's mostly "follow proper DNS steps and guidelines in the given format" with a little "show you're doing this for the intended reason rather than to circumvent something the PSL is not meant for/for something the public can't get to anyways" (e.g. tricking rate limits, internal only or single user personal sites) added on top.

https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/wiki/Guidelines#validat...

"Projects that are smaller in scale or are temporary or seasonal in nature will likely be declined. Examples of this might be private-use, sandbox, test, lab, beta, or other exploratory nature changes or requests. It should be expected that despite whatever site or service referred a requestor to seek addition of their domain(s) to the list, projects not serving more then thousands of users are quite likely to be declined."

Maybe the rules have changed, or maybe you were lucky? :)

Ah yeah, looks like it was added in 2022 https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/wiki/Guidelines/_compar...

Thanks for the note!

> but it's hard to argue that they don't have a gigantic influence on the whole internet, no? :)

Then don't relate this to safe browsing. What is the connection?

You could have just written a one liner. Google has too much power. This has nothing to do with safe-browsing.

In fact you could write...

- USA/China/EU etc has too much power..

You use the word relative in another reply..

Same way.. My employer has relatively too much power...

Is it? Companies like Google coddle users instead of teaching them how to browse smarter and detect phishing for themselves. Google wants people to stay ignorant so they can squeeze them for money instead of phishers.

How does Google get money out of people in that case? As a corporation, Google contributes greatly to the education sector and also profits greatly, so it seems like they're pro-education to me, and are merely making the best of a bad situation, but I'd love to hear how Google extracts money from the people they've protected from phishing schemes in some secret way that I haven't considered. I do happen to have Google stock in my portfolio though, so maybe that indight's my entire comment for you though.

This is a fine mentality when it takes a certain amount of "Internet street smarts" (a term used in the article) to access the internet - at least beyond AOL etc.

But over half of the world has internet access, mostly via Chrome (largely via Android inclusion). At least some frontline protection (that can be turned off) is warranted when you need to cater to at least the millions of people who just started accessing the internet today, and the billions who don't/can't/won't put the effort in to learn those "Internet street smarts".

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