[Sephr]

Google has convinced regulatory agencies that they're not responsible for their own complicity with supporting link fraud. I wrote an article about Google's role in enabling link fraud[1], which shows how this is effectively a form of regulatory capture.

Here's a particularly salient critique of these very same FBI recommendations, from my article:

> The FBI suggests “Before clicking on an advertisement, check the URL to make sure the site is authentic. A malicious domain name may be similar to the intended URL but with typos or a misplaced letter.” — this is useless advice in the face of unverified vanity URLs

1. https://eligrey.com/blog/link-fraud/

[kenjackson]

Can’t an ad always just redirect traffic to a vanity URL while exposing a non-vanity URL to Google?

[Sephr]

The core issue here is that Google does not effectively verify ownership of vanity URLs displayed to users. You may not ever connect to the vanity URL in the first place.

[janalsncm]

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect zero link fraud facilitated by Google, in the same way I don’t expect zero money laundering facilitated through banks. But banks are heavily regulated and (at a minimum) have to go through the motions of KYC and disrupting illegal activity.

I think the issue here is we have allowed online platforms to reap the rewards of scale without requiring any responsibility of serving a billion+ people. Internalize rewards, externalize responsibility.

[Sephr]

> I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect zero link fraud facilitated by Google

Link fraud is entirely preventable in an automated fashion. They just need to start enforcing their own policies.

Validating ownership of 'display URL' domains via DNS would completely eliminate the issue. It's quite simple.

[yard2010]

AFAIR it's against their code, they do have strict rules regarding their ads.

But it's funny I remember adsense fighting the bs fraud ads on the internet, only to become the bs fraud themselves..