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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

> doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing

If we lived in a sane world, Google would be held accountable for every scam they advertise. It doesn't matter if you think someone deserved to get scammed for using an ad blocker, because they never would have been scammed if Google didn't choose to put them in danger for the sake of profit.

"But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case, then they should scale down the amount of ads they allow until it reaches a manageable scale (eg every single ad can be reviewed by a human employee). They might make less money, but it's an expectation we have of nearly all industries (eg commercial truck drivers have to follow extra restrictions in addition to regular speed limits)

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Yes. "At our scale, we can't possibly do X" is a reason to not scale. It's not a reason to dodge doing X.

> "But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case

It's not, it never is; it's a lie on the level of "Poland attacked first". Say, if someone was offering you $40+ billion every 3 months to solve the issue, do you think you could? It's a ridiculous question, of course you could.

Yep, if Google lost money/owed damages every time someone got a fraudulent Google ad, you better believe those ads would be squeaky clean.

Sergey's flotilla needs a new vessel this year though, so can't do that.

Sergey also needs another few billion to spend on lobbying against the billionaire taxes.

> "But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say.

That defense doesn't work either way as they (and Facebook) also reject manual reports from users.

If we lived in a sane world, people would simply pay for what they use. Then we could avoid all this confusion, and google would have large (monetary) incentive to protect it's customers.

Google and Meta are entirely within their rights to make YouTube, Search, Facebook and Instagram into paid services for all users. Nobody is forcing them to advertise or to participate in criminal fraud with scam ads.

They are heading pretty steadfastly into multi billion dollar lawsuits the way they are going.

Multi-billion dollar lawsuits aren't such a disincentive when they are making hundreds of billions in profit every year.

>If we lived in a sane world, people would simply pay for what they use

This is some proper, indoctrinated, corporate bootlicker mentality.

95% of the phones on the market will spy on you, send your data back to the mothership, and they will sell your data to 3rd parties, and they cost $1400-$2000. You pay for the phone which is not even yours after the purchase, and then you still get ads, spied on, and your data sold. Google has a very large monetary incentive already to protect their customers and they do jack shit about the malware/adware in the play store.

TVs are even worse. LG TVs were just found to spy on you and nearby devices while they are off. Do you think those TVs are free? No, they also cost a fortune.

The current state of the world is that even if you pay you will get ads, spying, and malware. Get your head out of your ass.

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