I don't understand your position at all (and I don't mean this aggressively, I just can't get myself into a position of understanding). From my current perspective you seem to be absolving Google of any responsibility for, literally, their product.

My reasoning is:

Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.

They built the half that allows anyone with the money to put something on their platform. They didn't build the half that makes sure that they're not helping scammers, con artists, and outright criminals from reaching the global audience that their wonderful, profitable, scalable platform enables.

They should be policing it on their own to an extent that obvious scams and fake banking websites and clickbait should be detected. Even just to appear to not be a crime-facilitation platform, which they currently are.

To me it feels analogous to Microsoft and their commitment to security of Windows. It's not a priority because it's counter to profitability. Privatise the profits and socialise the costs.

If they can't control their own platform, they should not have the platform. It is not a mature enough product to be released upon the world. It is Frankenstein's monster, left to roam.

I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.

Which three letter agency said that an ad blocker was a required layer of security when browsing the web? There's a good reason: Google. If the Internet is full of scams, who is most responsible for its proliferation?

(I have a massive bias against advertising, so that heavily colours my opinion. I also understand that advertising is inevitable, but it should be held to a much higher standard than, well, the none that exists)

Ok, so, let’s reframe this:

How would you feel about your local tv station(as if that was a thing anymore) running an ad for senior citizens to invest in free energy generators to reduce their electricity bills?

There are so many blatant scams on Google’s platform that it is simply inexcusable. They are structurally unable to solve it because they have built a business out of being structurally unable to solve it.

That’s like saying that a wildly unsafe amusement park that allows just anyone to come in and set up whatever they want and charge for it is “structurally unable to protect their customers from harm” should just be allowed to keep throwing kids down a cliff in potato sacks just because someone figured out how to make money doing it.

There is no way for me to legally penalize some company in Croatia trying to trick people into paying 600 dollars for access to “free energy from the ground that they can sell to their neighbors”.

In the age of LLMs there is no way you can tell me that they can’t detect these kinds of scam advertisements , or that they can’t detect that country.gov.it.me isn’t probably not an official government site.

If they can’t, they should be put out of business, because they are a public nuisance at best.

They don’t do anything about it because they make money from having no ethical standards for the businesses they promote. No normal business is allowed to operate with a reckless disregard for the harms that they create.

We want the actual police (law enforcement) to enforce the law and the includes google. If someone reports that this is a scam to them, and they don't act (i.e. take reasonable measures to check), then they become a party to that fraud. We already have laws about this and they are breaking them.

I don't want them to be the police. I want them to give me the thing that I'm searching for first, not whoever outspent everyone else on SEO this year. If I'm searching for "Canadian visa application" then the first result must be the official government website for this. No policing involved - just good old accurate search, like Google used to be known for.

The most most innocent just duplicate the natural correct search result.