[tempestn]

Most of the good ad networks today (like Adsense) try very hard to do this already. The problem is that it's not easy. For instance, how do you stop a malicious advertiser from creating a legitimate looking ad that points to a legitimate looking page, then redirecting it to a different page after the ad is vetted? What if it only redirects for certain IP address ranges? And that's just one example of a technique a malicious advertiser could use. None of the top tier networks want malicious ads on their platforms. The problem is that it's difficult to remove them.

Also, even if you could catch everything with manual human vetting of every ad, it would be cost-prohibitive. (Either you would have to pay less to publishers, or charge more to advertisers. The latter would likely be a non-starter, because it is already difficult for most small advertisers to run positive ROI campaigns. The former would put further pressure on publishers, making them even less likely to accept the risk of these proposed lawsuits.)

I would love to see online advertising improved, and I think there are certainly possible ways to go about it. I'm just trying to illustrate that it's not as easy as, "don't let people publish or distribute bad ads."

To borrow the analogy from the article, we couldn't stop spam by going after the email providers for allowing it through.