alt Hacker News> 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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> "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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.