[jeroenhd]

Google doesn't sell their list to you. They give it to you for free. Using their list costs them money. Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive.

Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.

The incentives are different.

[crote]

Step 1: Get everyone to use your free internet filter

Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".

Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter.

Step 4: Profit!

The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?

[jeroenhd]

> Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".

Yeah, sounds like a great cartel idea, if they actually did that. None of my domains ever got marked as potentially harmful, even the one that I bought as a joke because it would be so easy to turn it into a phishing site.

Not everything is a big conspiracy to oppress the population. We hear about the cases where it goes wrong because the HN front page is the fastest way to reach the single part-time support person Google seems to employ.

[encom]

>pretty successfully with email

Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad.

EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.

[hedora]

I've found that, whenever considering Google's actions and incentives, you need to remember two things:

- They make almost all their money on advertising

- They have deep ties to the US intelligence agencies (To the point that a Google employee managed the appointment calendar for our Secretary of State a few years ago!)

So, how would these incentives apply to their Internet blacklist?

- If you are parking lots of Google ad spam, they are taking a cut of your revenue, so they have an incentive to take you off the list (evidence and testimony from the antitrust trial documented ongoing fraud in every layer of Google's vertical ad monopoly)

- If you are hosting something the intelligence agencies dislike / are neutral to / like, that'll impact your presence on the list.

[Macha]

Not true. Commercial or large scale use requires you to use their Web Risk API instead which is a paid service

[cortesoft]

> Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive

There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”