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Comment by digitalengineer | Hacker News Reader

>This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see

Call me skeptical, but won't it just lead to shell companies?

Sure, but this puts the spotlight back on the countries which allow shady crap.

Take the United Kingdom. Google says Foo Ltd. are the advertiser, who are Foo Ltd? Well the UK legally requires Foo Ltd. to register with Companies House, a government agency, and this registration legally must identify Persons with Significant Control, actual humans who make decisions for Foo Ltd.

But when you look closer you discover that Foo Ltd has a company secretary who lives in a run down area of an ex-industrial city, and who is listed as secretary for 1800 other companies, and its offices are registered as that person's flat. The PSC section is filled out with the name Offshore Holdings Inc. offering the address of a law firm in the British Virgin Islands, even though the law is clear that Persons means very specifically human individuals.

The UK could clean this up, but of course the people hidden behind this sort of thing are actually wealthy and powerful and are doing all they can to ensure nothing changes. Similar things happen in the US, and in several other developed nations you probably think of as law-abiding and straight dealing. Google can't fix any of that, so this is all you get.

>But when you look closer you discover

What percentage of people who view the ad are going to do this?

More than the number of people who were able to do so before. And hopefully if they find something shady they will let others know. This is why we require certain political ads to be attributed.

Everyone that installed the browser extension that annotates ads for them.

You're referring to financial shell companies used for tax evasion and are a very specific kind of shell company.

Shell companies in general are pretty commonly used and pretty common in the US (I can't speak to other countries). It's very easy to setup a very basic corporation anywhere in the US and can take anywhere from a week to a month depending on the state.

That corporation can get paid to run ads by another corporation. The new corporation will pay Google to run the ads and will still pay taxes, but their name will show up. The new corporation is providing a service as a middleman.

There are some specific restrictions on doing this kind of thing for other purchases and acting on others behalf, but not for ad buys.

The type of company you're thinking of would insist it's engaged in tax avoidance not evasion, and since the UK has a General Anti-Avoidance Rule it would furthermore claim that the tax efficiency is a result of some otherwise quite reasonable behaviour and isn't some scheme that makes no sense except for how it conveniently avoids taxation. But mostly, as you hint, it's hoping to stay under the radar so nobody asks awkward questions.

However my point applies for shady outfits advertising on Google too. It may make sense for some companies to pay money to have a third party place their advertising, perhaps as part of some value-added service that offsets the extra cost, but under a know-your-customer regime that company doesn't want to annoy Google. If you earn $10M a year re-selling Google's adverts then the chance to earn $1M putting your name on an obvious scam is a bad deal - Google's going to cut you off and there goes the $10M pa revenue.

So the first type of shell is likely to get implicated in scummy stuff that happens in future, and as I showed you'll find out it's a dead end because your government doesn't care about making businesses tell the truth about who they are. And that's not Google's fault, it's something your elected representatives might fix if they thought you knew and cared.

> But when you look closer

If you have US based LLC there is no looking closer. The only thing public will be your registered agent and company name, nothing else.

Just looked at my LLC. Has business address and agent and lists my human name as the Governor of the company. Your claim seems incorrect.

This depends entirely on the state. Four states, notably including Delaware, permit registration of an LLC with absolutely no public disclosure of parties involved beyond the agent. Other states consider this information public record but don't make it easily accessible.

Ok, makes sense. I'm in WA and we've got what some call good FOIA and "sunshine" laws.

There are already shell companies. PACs serve to obfuscate the source of funding. I don't see a reason why there will be more shell companies, if the existing ones can be used in this area.

At least, people maybe able to know the group associated to the ads suspiciously tries to hide their identity. Not perfect, but still an improved situation.

Lead to...?

See: Astroturfing (2019), Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Fmh4RdIwswE

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

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