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Comment by morkalork | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be that guy but is it Google's responsibility to police legally operating insurance companies? It's not their problem that USA has a trash insurance market and a backwards healthcare system.

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I believe traditional publishers had pretty specific liability for the stuff they carry. There's no magic exclusion for ads that I know of.

Source? Specifically, examples where publishers were sued for fraudulent products they advertised?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beardstown_Ladies is the exemplar

That's a book publisher being liable for the book it published.

We're looking for a newspaper publisher being liable for the ad it published. Not a story it published.

Poor, powerless Google. The scrappy, ragtag outfit down in Mountain View, barely hanging on, unable to downrank predatory insurance companies. I'll say an extra prayer for them during Compline tonight.

Didn't say they were powerless but you do you

Imagine how hard moderating a forum is. Now imagine moderating the whole Internet. Everyone always thinks it's trivial. Everyone couldn't be more wrong.

How convenient that Google gets to reap all of the benefits of that situation without bearing any of the responsibility. Oh, but it's fine, because they have a trillion dollars and "it's hard, you guuyyysss!"

"lets make private corporations responsible for policing the behavior of other corporations instead of the government and legislation" <- this is what I'm hearing

Yes, we should not have built internet scale services and forums if it was not possible to moderate them effectively.

Legally? No. However, due to their alteration of search results anything that becomes the top is effectively an endorsement regardless of whether it was chosen by the black box or their employees. They already remove legally operating websites they disagree with. Since they’re selective editors with multiple lost antitrust suits, the only thing we as consumers can do is criticize. Especially as most of these companies top the charts due to SEO spam and not genuine traffic.

Imagine a magazine that only had garbage ads for scam insurance, adware, and cheap Chinese $2 trinkets, would you keep your subscription?

You can't cancel google. They make sure of it

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