> 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.

Google is not a public road. It is A company that operates on public roads that delivers advertising. It’s a company driving around billboard trailers on public roads. Are you saying that a billboard company should not have any ethical standards or liability regarding the companies that they advertise on their billboards? Somehow, Google manages to not openly advertise CSAM buttthey can’t shutdown obvious scams? It’s simply a matter of having a responsible review procedure before publishing an ad. In the age of LLMs , you can’t tell me that is impossible.

I understand your point a lot better now, thank you. And I like the 'public cars / roads' example and have possibly used it myself in discussions about cryptography and government backdoors etc.

Respectfully, however, I still disagree in this case, although I'm struggling how to articulate why - beyond admitting it could just be my bias against advertising.

My best attempt at articulation is:

Google have built a private road over the top of the public road, that is then spilling sewage and toxic materials onto the public road. Google's private road purely serves to profit Google. There's no public good it is serving, not like a public road or electricity infrastructure.

In writing that, yes, it's a government policy / legislation / regulation failure. But also, Google should be doing better. However, as WorldMaker said above, their brand seems somewhat confusingly, unaffected, so Google has incentive to do better than bottom-of-the-barrel.

As such I can't lay no blame, or anything less than majority blame, at Google's feet. Yes, government's around the world should be doing better at containing the spilling of toxic waste into public spaces that Google both facilitates and turns a blind eye to. Google are too profitable to fail since they can buy the continued regulation vacuum.

I'm not sure how far that went off the rails, I may have just continued ranting a bit there.

Thank you for your replies, though, I do see it from a slightly different angle.