In the past, browsers used an algorithm which only denied setting wide-ranging cookies for top-level domains with no dots (e.g. com or org). However, this did not work for top-level domains where only third-level registrations are allowed (e.g. co.uk). In these cases, websites could set a cookie for .co.uk which would be passed onto every website registered under co.uk.
Since there was and remains no algorithmic method of finding the highest level at which a domain may be registered for a particular top-level domain (the policies differ with each registry), the only method is to create a list. This is the aim of the Public Suffix List.
(https://publicsuffix.org/learn/)
God I hate the web. The engineering equivalent of a car made of duct tape.
Kind of. But do you have a better proposition?
End of random rant.
But then you would loose plattform independency, the main selling point of this atrocity.
Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted.
The best thing to happen, that I can see, is that a sane subset crystalizes, that people start to use dominantly, with the rest becoming legacy, only maintained to have it still working.
But I do dream of a fresh rewrite of the web since university (and the web was way slimmer back then), but I got a bit more pragmatic and I think I understood now the massive problem of solving trusted human communication better. It ain't easy in the real world.
This all just drives a need to come up with ever more tacked-on protection schemes because browsers have big targets painted on them.
Anyway, in your scenario the controller would be essentially a one off and you'd be better off writing a native app to interface with it for the one computer this experiment will run on.
And that's before realizing it's already a bad idea with existing devices because they were never designed for giving untrusted actors direct access.
Not unlike the programming language or the app (growing until it half-implements LISP or half-implements an email client), the browser will grow until it half-implements an operating system.
For everyone else, there's already w3m.
WebUSB I don't use or would miss it right now, but .. the main potential use case is security and it sounds somewhat reasonable
"Use in multi-factor authentication
WebUSB in combination with special purpose devices and public identification registries can be used as key piece in an infrastructure scale solution to digital identity on the internet."
You have sites now that let you debug microcontrollers on your browser, super cool.
Same thing but with firmware updates in the browser. Cross platform, replaced a mess of ugly broken vendor tools.
Your micro-controllers should use open standards for their debugging interface and not force people to use the vendor website.
Yes. Regards, CIA, Mossad, FSB etc.
You remove that, and videoconferencing (for business or person to person) has to rely on downloading an app, meaning whoever is behind the website has to release for 10-15 OSes now. Some already do, but not everyone has that budget so now there's a massive moat around it.
> But do we need e.g serial port or raw USB access straight from a random website
Being able to flash an IoT (e.g. ESP32) device from the browser is useful for a lot of people. For the "normies", there was also Stadia allowing you to flash their controller to be a generic Bluetooth/usb one on a website, using that webUSB. Without it Google would have had to release an app for multiple OSes, or more likely, would have just left the devices as paperweights. Also, you can use FIDO/U2F keys directly now, which is pretty good.
Browsers are the modern Excel, people complain that they do too much and you only need 20%. But it's a different 20% for everyone.
Same as your camera/microphone/location.
If you give USB access, it is not really a website anymore, rather a app delivered through the web. I don't see a fundamental difference in trust.
I rather am able to verify the web based version easier and I certainly won't give access to a random website, just like I don't download random exes from websites.
Performance is lower, yes and well ... like I said, it is all a big mess. Just look at the global namespace in js. I still use it because of that power feature called plattform independence. What I release, people can (mostly) just use. I (mostly) don't care which OS the user has.
But do we need audio, images, Canvas, WebGL, etc? The web could just be plain text and we’d get most of the “useful” content still, add images and you get a vast majority of it.
But the idea that the web is a rich environment that has all of these bells and whistles is a good thing imo. Yes there’s attack surface to consider, and it’s not negligible. However, the ability to connect so many different things opens up simple access to things that would otherwise require discrete apps and tooling.
One example that kind of blew my mind is that I wanted a controller overlay for my Twitch stream. After a short bit of looking, there isn’t even a plugin needed in OBS (streaming software). Instead, you add a Web View layer and point it to GamePad Viewer[1] and you’re done.
Serial and USB are possibly a boon for very specific users with very specific accessibility needs. Also, iirc some of the early iPhone jailbreaks worked via websites on a desktop with your iPhone plugged into usb. Sure these are niche, and could probably be served just as well or better with native apps, and web also makes the barrier to entry so much lower .
I think the giant major downside, is that they've written a rootkit that runs on everything, and to try to make up for that they want to make it so only sites they allow can run.
It's not really very powerful at all if nobody can use it, at that point you are better off just not bothering with it at all.
The Internet may remain, but the Web may really be dead.
But people do use it, like the both of us right now?
People also use maps, do online banking, play games, start complex interactive learning environments, collaborate in real time on documents etc.
All of that works right now.
What do you mean, you can run whatever you want on localhost, and it's quite easy to host whatever you want for whoever you want too. Maybe the biggest modern added barrier to entry is that having TLS is strongly encouraged/even needed for some things, but this is an easily solved problem.
I don't see how that solves the issue that PSL tries to fix. I was a script kiddy hosting neopets phishing pages on free cpanel servers from <random>.ripway.com back in 2007. Browsers were way less capable then.
It's not even broken as the edge cases are addressed by ad-hoc solutions.
OP is complaining about global infrastructure not having a pristine design. At best it's a complain over a desirable trait. It's hardly a reason to pull the Jr developer card and mindlessly advocate for throwing everything out and starting over.
We live in world where whatever faang adopts is de facto a standard. Accessible these days means google/gmail/facebook/instagram/tiktok works. Everything else is usually forced to follow along.
People will adopt whatever gives them access to their daily dose of doomscrolling and then complain about rather crucial part of their lives like online banking not working.
> And of course, if the new solution completely invalidates old sites, it just won't get picked up.
Old sites don't matter, only high-traffic sites riddled with dark patterns matter. That's the reality, even if it is harsh.
Try 90s! We had to fight off ActiveX Plugins left and right in the good olde Internet Explorer! Yarr! ;-)
This might be what's needed to break out of the current local optimum.
which is still much too new to be able to shut down the PSL of course. but maybe in 2050.
CORS lets sites define their own security boundaries between subdomains, with mutual validation. If you're hosting user content in a subdomain, just don't allow-origin it: that is a clear statement that it's not "the same site". PSL plays absolutely no part in that logic, it seems clear to me that it's at least in part intended to replace the PSL.
Do other sites (like google's safety checks) use CORS for this purpose? Dunno. Seems like they could though? Or am I missing something?
I just came up with that in 2 minutes, so it might not be perfect, but you can see how with a little bit of work there's much better solutions than "I check for not-evil domain in list!"
So now, if a website leaks its private key, attackers can exfiltrate cookies from all of its users just by making them open an attacker-controlled link, for as long as the cookie lives (and users don't visit the website to get the rotated key).
> If the web server needs a cookie, it should request one
This adds a round-trip, which slows down the website on slow connections.
> the client can submit again to "reply" to this "request"
This requires significantly overhauling HTTP and load-balancers. The public-suffix list exists because it's an easy workaround that didn't take a decade to specify and implement.
This attack already exists in several forms (leaking a TLS private key, DNS hijack, CA validation attack, etc). You could tack a DNS name onto the crypto-cookies if you wanted to, but DNS is trivial to attack.
> This adds a round-trip, which slows down the website on slow connections.
Requests are already slowed down by the gigantic amount of cookies constantly being pushed by default. The server can send a reply-header once which will tell the client which URLs need cookies perpetually, and the client can store that and choose whether it sends the cookies repeatedly or just when requested. This gives the client much more control over when it leaks users' data.
> This requires significantly overhauling HTTP and load-balancers
No change is needed. Web applications already do all of this all the time. (example: the Location: header is frequently sent by web apps in response to specific requests, to say nothing of REST and its many different request and return methods/statuses/headers).
> The public-suffix list exists because it's an easy workaround
So the engine of modern commerce is just a collection of easy hacks. Fantastic.
An attacker who gets the TLS private key of a website can't use it easily, because they still need to fool users' browser into connecting to a server they control as the victim domain, which brings us to:
> You could tack a DNS name onto the crypto-cookies if you wanted to, but DNS is trivial to attack.
It's not. I can think of two ways to attack the DNS. Either 1. control or MITM of the victim's authoritative DNS server or 2. poison users' DNS cache.
Control/MITM of the authoritative server is not an option for everyone (only ISPs/backbone operators), and according to Cloudflare: "DNS poisoning attacks are not easy" (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-cache-poisoning/)
> Requests are already slowed down by the gigantic amount of cookies constantly being pushed by default
Yes, although adding more data and adding a round-trip have different impacts (high-bandwidth high-latency connections exist). Lots of cookies and more round-trips is always worse than lots of cookies and a fewer round-trips.
> The server can send a reply-header once which will tell the client which URLs need cookies perpetually, and the client can store that and choose whether it sends the cookies repeatedly or just when requested.
Everyone hate configuring cache, so in most cases site operators will leave it to a default "send everything", and we're back to square one.
> No change is needed.
I was thinking that servers need to remember state between the initial client request and when the client sends an other request with the cookies. But on second thought that's indeed not necessary.
> So the engine of modern commerce is just a collection of easy hacks. Fantastic.
I'm afraid so
Cache poisoning is the easiest method, and contrary to whatever Cloudflare says, it's trivial. The DNS transaction number is 16-bits. All you have to do is flood the shit out of the resolver with spoofed packets and eventually one of the transaction numbers will hit, and your attack is successful. It's low-bandwidth, takes at most a couple hours, and nobody notices. This is one of the many reasons you can't just trust whatever DNS says.
The choice of what HTTP messages to cache is not always a choice, as is the case with HSTS. But it could be made one if testing of this proposal (which again, I came up with in 2 minutes) showed better results one way or another.
But all this is moot anyway cuz nobody gives a crap.
[0] https://www.soundandvision.com/content/remembering-time-when...
Not really. Does the car still drive? That sounds like a software bug; hardly indicative that the entire car is held together with duct tape, but a pretty bad bug non the less.
It's just harder to drive to one house, and the homeowner is justifiably irritated about this.
Google doesn't have the force of law (it's in this context acting more like a Yelp: "1 star review --- our secret shopper showed up and the manager didn't give the secret 'we are not criminals' hand sign"), but the basic idea is the same: there is a complex web of interactions that can impact your online presence and experts in the field you can choose to hire for consulting or not.
Didn't used to be that way, but the web used to be a community of 100,000 people, not 5.6 billion. Everything gets more complicated when you add more people.
The browser issue can destroy a small business, one thing I think we can universally agree we don't want. If all of the people who come looking for it find it's being marked as malicious or just can't get there at all, they lose customers.
Worse yet, is that Google holds the keys because everyone uses Chrome, and you have to play their game by their rules just to keep breathing.
I honestly don't immediately know how to weigh those risks against each other, but I'll note that this community likely underestimates the second one. Most web users are not nearly as tech- or socially-savvy as the average HN reader and the various methods of getting someone to a malware subdomain are increasingly sophisticated.
"This is Fine."
Before we put computers in cars, we had the myriad small things that would break (stuck doors, stuck windows, failed seals, leaking gaskets), a continuous stream of recalls for low-probability safety issues, and the occasional Gremlin or Pinto.
My favorite example is the Hyundai Elantra. They changed the alloy used in one of the parts in the undercarriage. Tested that model to death for a year, as they do, but their proving ground is in the southern United States.
Several winters later, it turns out that road salt attacks the hell out of that alloy and people have wheels flying off their cars in the middle of the road.
And judging by eBay prices, or the SwissMicros product line, I suspect I have plenty of company.
This is mostly a browser security mistake but also partly a product of ICANN policy & the design of the domain system, so it's not just the web.
Also, the list isn't really that long, compared to, say, certificate transparency logs; now that's a truly mad solution.
A centralized list like this not just for domains as a whole (e.g. co.uk) but also specific sites (e.g. s3-object-lambda.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com) is both kind of crazy in that the list will bloat a lot over the years, as well as a security risk for any platform that needs this functionality but would prefer not to leak any details publicly.
We already have the concept of a .well-known directory that you can use, when talking to a specific site. Similarly, we know how you can nest subdomains, like c.b.a.x, and it's more or less certain that you can't create a subdomain b without the involvement of a, so it should be possible to walk the chain.
Example:
c --> https://b.a.x/.well-known/public-suffix
b --> https://a.x/.well-known/public-suffix
a --> https://x/.well-known/public-suffix
The point is to get away from centralized gatekeepers, not establish more of them. A hierarchy of disavowal. It’s like cache invalidation for accountability.
If you don’t wanna be held responsible for something, you’d better be prepared to point the finger at someone whois.
I’m not sure how you’d have this - it’s for the public facing side of user hosted content, surely that must be public?
> We already have the concept of a .well-known directory that you can use, when talking to a specific site.
But the point is to help identify dangerous sites, by definition you can’t just let the sites mark themselves as trustworthy and rotate around subdomains. If you have an approach that doesn’t have to trust the site, you also don’t need any definition at the top level you could just infer it.
Although technically it might be better as `.wellknown/taint-regex` (now we have three problems), like `TAINT "*.sites.myhost.com" ; "myhost.com/uploads/*" ; ...`
The thing you want to avoid is this:
a.scamsite.com gets blocked so they just put their phishing pages on b.scamsite.com
The psl or your solution isn’t a “don’t trust subdomains” notification it’s “if one subdomain is bad, you should still trust the others” and the problem there is you can’t trust them.
You could combine the two, but you still need the suffix list or similar curation.
There's some ways of like "nofollow", but nothing systematic, and no "protocol" for disavowing paths, uploads, or fragments.
Back in the slashdot days, I thought of "blogs are the stationary of the internet", a way to more authoritatively declare that the content was yours... but interop is hard and unprofitable so walled gardens became the norm.
We just haven't had the benefit or forcing function which encourages a solution to "that stuff over there is less trusted than my stuff over here".
Maybe we're at the point where hosts of any kind MUST be responsible (or accountable) for any content originating from their domain? It kills indie/anonymous hosting, but puts a fine "KYC" point on distributing "evil" stuff on the internet?
> We just haven't had the benefit or forcing function which encourages a solution to "that stuff over there is less trusted than my stuff over here".
No the problem is we can't let people say "that stuff is someone elses fault" when it is their own fault.
Scammers will claim subdomains are actually just not them and are other bad actors, and you're back to loads of phishing pages.
> Maybe we're at the point where hosts of any kind MUST be responsible (or accountable) for any content originating from their domain?
We already are at that point, the PSL is to get past it for cases where people host on subdomains. Netlify shouldn't have to risk having every customer flagged if one customer is a phisher. The curation is vital.
The other solution would be to have another approach around hosting where verifiable owners could publish wherever they want and it's tied to a real entity, but that has other worrying outcomes I assume.
The other way of looking at it might be similar to "DMARC-4-HTTP", ie: sign Content-Length, Content-Sig with a public/private key and if you include `SELECT comments FROM evil` then that "taints" your key.
It gets back to netlify that index.html would be signed by netlify.gpg, but haxor.netlify.com would be signed by not_netlify.gpg
...we can call it "web of trust 2.0" :-P
Appreciate the honest discussion!
One key difference between this list and standard DNS (at least as I understand it; maybe they added an extension to DNS I haven't seen) is the list requires independent attestation. You can't trust `foo.com` to just list its subdomains; that would be a trivial attack vector for a malware distributor to say "Oh hey, yeah, trustme.com is a public suffix; you shouldn't treat its subdomains as the same thing" and then spin up malware1.trustme.com, malware2.trustme.com, etc. Domain owners can't be the sole arbiter of whether their domain counts as a "public suffix" from the point of view of user safety.
$ dig +short txt _psl.website.one @1.1.1.1
"https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/2625"
Most of the complex thing I have seen being made (or contributed to) needed duct tape sooner or later. Engineering is the art of trade-offs, of adapting to changing requirements (that can appear due to uncontrollable events external to the project), technology and costs.
Related, this is how the first long distance automobile trip was done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-countr... . Seems to me it had quite some duct tape.
Web is not a new thing and hardly a technical experiment of a few people any more.
If you add the time since announcing the concept of Web to that trip date, you have a very decent established industry already. With many sport and mass production designs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cars_introduced_in_19...
Not sure what is your point about "decent established industry" if we relate to "duct tape". I see two possibilities:
a) you imply that the web does not have a decent established industry (but I would guess not).
b) you would claim that there was no "duct tape" in 1924 car industry. I am no expert but I would refer you to the article describing what was the procedure to start the car at https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-start-their-cars-in-the-..., to quote:
> Typical cold-start routine (common 1930s workflow)
> 1. Set hand choke (pull knob).
> 2. Set throttle lever to slight fast‑idle.
> 3. Retard spark if manual advance present.
> 4. Engage starter (electric) or use hand crank.
> 5. Once running, push choke in gradually, advance spark, reduce throttle.
Not sure about your opinion but compared to what a car's objective is (move from point A to point B) to me that sounds rather involved. Not sure if it qualifies as "duct-tape" but definitely it is not a "nicely implemented system that just works".
To resume my point: I think on average progress is slower and harder than people think. And that is mostly because people do not have exposure to the work people are doing to improve things until something can become more "widely available".
Idk any other way to solve it for the general public (ideally each user would probably pick what root certs they trust), but it does seem crazy.
This solution is even more obvious today where most certificates are just DNS lookups with extra steps.
I'm not sure how people not already having hit this very issue before is supposed to know about it beforehand though, one of those things that you don't really come across until you're hit by it.
Fun learning new things so often but I never once heard of the public suffix list.
That said, I do know the other best practices mentioned elsewhere
Which then links to: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/wiki/Guidelines#submitt...
Fairly obvious and typical webpage > documentation flow I think, doesn't seem too hard to find.
Google 90s to 2010 is nothings like Google 2025. There is a reason they removed "Don't be evil" ... being evil and authoritarian makes more money.
Looking at you Manifest V2 ... pour one out for your homies.
This is the first thing i disable in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. The only safe thing they do is safely sending all my browsing history to Google or Microsoft.
This feature is there for my mother-in-law, who never saw a popup ad she didn't like. You might think I'm kidding; I am not. I periodically had to go into her Android device and dump twenty apps she had manually installed from the Play Store because they were in a ring of promoting each other.
Well, if the legal system used the same "Guilty until proven innocent" model, we would definitely "catch more bad actors than false positive good actors".
That's a tricky one, isn't it.
A better analogy, unfortunately for all the reasons it's unfortunate, is police: acting on the partial knowledge in the field to try to make the not-worst decision.
many google employee is in here, so I dont expect them to be agree with you
Google needs to be held liable for the damages they do in cases like this or they will continue to implement the laziest solutions as long as they can externalize the costs.
I wish this comment were top ranked so it would be clear immediately from the comments what the root issue was.
For example:
1. Add a subdomain to test something out
2. Complete your test and remove the subdomain from your site
3. Forget to remove the DNS entry and now your A record points to an IP address
I had this happen to me once with PDF books being served through a subdomain on my site. Of course it's my mistake for not removing the A record (I forgot) but I'll never make that mistake again.
10 years of my domain having a good history may have gotten tainted in an unrepairable way. I don't get warnings visiting my site but traffic has slowly gotten worse over time since around that time, despite me posting more and more content. The correlation isn't guaranteed, especially with AI taking away so much traffic but it's something I do think about.
1. Immich hosts user content on their domain. And should thus be on the public suffic list.
2. When users host an open source self hosted project like immich, jellyfin, etc. on their own domain it gets flagged as phishing because it looks an awful lot like the publicly hosted version, but it's on a different domain, and possibly a domain that might look suspicious to someone unfamiliar with the project, because it includes the name of the software in the domain. Something like immich.example.com.
The first one is fairly straightforward to deal with, if you know about the public suffix list. I don't know of a good solution for the second though.
I get that SPAM, etc., are an issue, but, like f* google-chrome, I want to browse the web, not some carefully curated list of sites some giant tech company has chosen.
A) you shouldn't be using google-chrome at all B) Firefox should definitely not be using that list either C) if you are going to have a "safe sites" list, that should definitely be a non-profit running that, not an automated robot working for a large probably-evil company...
It's browser beware when you do, but you can do it.
The problem is that at least some of the people maintaining this list seem to be a little trigger happy. And I definitely thing Google probably isn't the best custodian of such a list, as they have obvious conflicts of interest.
And how and who should define what is consider unsafe sites?
But this is not that list because sites are added using opaque automated processes that are clearly not being reviewed by humans - even if those sites have been removed previously after manual review.
People are reacting as if this list is some kind of overbearing way of tracking what people do on the web - it's almost the opposite of that. It's worth clarifying this is just a suffix list for user-hosted content. It's neither a list of user-hosted domains nor a list of safe websites generally - it's just suffixes for a very small specific use-case: a company providing subdomains. You can think of this as a registry of domain sub-letters.
For instance:
- GitHub.io is on the list but GitHub.com is not - GitHub.com is still considered safe
- I self-host an immich instance on my own domain name - my immich instance isn't flagged & I don't need to add anything to the list because I fully own the domain.
The specific instance is just for Immich themselves who fully own "immich.cloud" but sublet subdomains under it to users.
> *if you are going to have a "safe sites" list"
This is not a safe sites list! This is not even a sites list at all - suffixes are not sites. This also isn't even a "safe" list - in fact it's really a "dangerous" list for browsers & various tooling to effectively segregate security & privacy contexts.
Google is flagging the Immich domain not because it's missing from the safe list but because it has legitimate dangers & it's missing from the dangerous list that informs web clients of said dangers so they can handle them appropriately.
I've coined the phrase "Postel decentralization" to refer to things where people expect there to be some distributed consensus mechanism but it turned out that the design of the internet was to email Jon Postel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel) to get your name on a list. e.g. how IANA was originally created.
I was just deploying your_spotify and gave it your-spotify.<my services domain> and there was a warning in the logs that talked about thud, linking the issue:
I know the second issue can be a legitimate problem but I feel like the first issue is the primary problem here & the "solution" to the second issue is a remedy that's worse than the disease.
The public suffix list is a great system (despite getting serious backlash here in HN comments, mainly from people who have jumped to wildly exaggerated conclusions about what it is). Beyond that though, flagging domains for phishing for having duplicate content smells like an anti-self-host policy: sure there's phishers making clone sites, but the vast majority of sites flagged are going to be legit unless you employ a more targeted heuristic, but doing so isn't incentivised by Google's (or most company's) business model.
This is very clearly just bad code from Google.
Normally I see the PSL in context of e.g. cookies or user-supplied forms.
Yes. For instance in circumstances exactly as described in the thread you are commenting in now and the article it refers to.
Services like google's bad site warning system may use it to indicate that it shouldn't consider a whole domain harmful if it considers a small number of its subdomains to be so, where otherwise they would. It is no guarantee, of course.
For example, if users are supposed to log in on the base account in order to access content on the subdomains, then using the public suffix list would be problematic.
What would you recommend for this actual use case? Even splitting it off to a separate domain name as they’re planning merely reduces the blast radius of Google’s false positive, but does not eliminate it.
None of these are the kind of automatic user-generated content that the warning is attempting to detect, I think. And requiring basic auth for everything is quite awkward, especially if the deployment includes API server functionality with bearer token auth combined with unauthenticated endpoints for things like built-in documentation.
I appreciate the issue it tries to solve but it doesn't seem like a sane solution to me.
Browsers already do various levels of isolation based on domain / subdomains (e.g. cookies). PSL tells them to treat each subdomain as if it were a top level domain because they are operated (leased out to) different individuals / entities. WRT to blocking, it just means that if one subdomain is marked bad, it's less likely to contaminate the rest of the domain since they know it's operated by different people.
Informing decisions about blocking doesn't make much sense (IMO) because it's little more than a speed bump for an attacker. Certainly every little bit can potentially help but it also introduces a new central authority, presents an additional hurdle for legitimate operators, introduces a number of new failure modes, and in this case seems relatively trivial for a determined attacker to overcome.
The fact it's used by one or more browsers in that way is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Because they, the browsers, are pointing a finger to someone else and accusing them of criminal behavior. That is what a normal user understands this warning as.
Turns out they are wrong. And in being wrong they may well have harmed the party they pointed at, in reputation and / or sales.
It's remarkable how short sighted this is, given that the web is so international. Its not a defense to say some third party has a list, and you're not on it so you're dangerous
Incredible
You're honor, we hurt the plaintiff because it's better than nothing!
The point I raise is that the internet is international. There are N legal systems that are going to deal with this. And in 99% of them this isn't going to end well for Google if plaintiff can show there are damages to a reasonable degree.
It's bonkers in terms of risk management.
If you want to make this a workable system you have to make it very clear this isn't necessarily dangerous at all, or criminal. And that a third party list was used, in part, to flag it. And even then you're impeding visitors to a website with warnings without any evidence that there is in fact something wrong.
If this happens to a political party hosting blogs, it's hunting season.
Lacking a global authority, Google is right to implement a filter themselves. Most people are really really dumb online and if not as clearly "DO NOT ENTER" as now, I don't think the warnings will work. I agree that from a legal standpoint it's super dangerous. Content moderation (which is basically what this is) is an insanely difficult problem for any platform.