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)

Newspapers and TV channels were held to Truth in Advertising Laws, and obvious scams would trigger law suits, from consumer groups, from the FCC itself sometimes, from rival newspapers and TV channels.

Google has enough of a near-monopoly in ads that there aren't rivals scaled enough to defend the public good out of the greed of their pocket books if not the good of everyone else. Google's competitors are too busy selling ad space to the same and similar lowest common denominator polluters and scammers than to police Google enough to hope to put it out of business.

The FCC gave up on policing anything on the internet ages ago. Between Congressional protections and multiple administrations trying to keep the FCC weak, it doesn't seem to have enough power to do anything towards Google.

I suppose that leaves consumer advocacy groups. I don't know how we build and scale a Consumers Against Predatory Google Ads to the point that it can force Google to reconsider their approach to advertising for the consumer good instead of evil. But then I also don't understand how Google isn't already doing tremendous enough damage to their brand that there isn't already enough of a sentiment that Google is actively engaged in evil and needs to stop, five or six years ago at least (or maybe at least as far back as when Google bought/merged Doubleclick). Their brand, too, seems too big to fail at this point, and it is weird to me.

> 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.

Baked into this is the assumption that the "responsible, difficult half" is something that they, rather than law enforcement, should be doing to begin with. Which they can't do effectively because they don't have the ability to impose significant penalties and we certainly don't want to give them that.

Consider how this is even supposed to work. There is often no conclusive way to tell ex ante whether some website is a scam; the premise of them is to look like a real site. Google doesn't know if it's a scammer or some third party contractor who has be commissioned by the actual entity to set up a new site, and real sites are often full of bad UI choices and weird bugs, or open up to nothing more than a login page which the ad network has no credentials to get past.

The way this works with actual law enforcement is that someone suspects a site of being a scam, or a victim files a police report, and then officers investigate. They spend significant resources to figure out if it's actually a scam or just e.g. a competitor trying to have their competition removed from visibility. They have special powers to conduct searches with probable cause. And then if it is a scam, they arrest the scammers, and if it's a false report, they charge that person for filing a false police report, which are necessary in order to provide a deterrent and prevent both of those misbehaviors from proliferating.

Otherwise you get untold numbers of false reports from people trying to grief their rivals, it takes just as much work to do a thorough investigation for each one, and then even if you catch the actual scammers, they just immediately reappear under a different name.

So then they get zillions of reports, many of them fraudulent, and you're proposing to put them in jail if they ever fail to do something they there is no apparent way for them to consistently do.

> 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.

Consider how this would apply to anything other than advertising. Some bank robbers buy Halloween masks to hide their faces. Drug dealers sell drugs over the internet and a normal mail/package carrier delivers the packages. A hitman rides the bus on the way to a hit. These are felonies! But we don't expect UPS to cut open everyone's packages or the bus driver to strip search every passenger to check for a vial of polonium, and punish them if they ever fail, because that isn't their job. They're not the police.