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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

It's not a high priory for Google stopping spam, same for all major tech companies. Their framing of this is that they are not the internet's babysitters. An assumption is users bear some responsibility for not being scammed or it's not profitable for them to invest lots of resources into stopping spam. ISPs are somewhat different in that customers are paying and ISPs bear a greater cost, so they tend to take spam more aggressively.

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They're maybe not the internet's "babysitters", but they are the "babysitters" of their own network infrastructure and services, and these spammer scum do abuse that infrastructure and waste/steal bandwidth and other resource that don't belong to them. You'd think Google would want to put a stop to that when it's gotten to a point where it's happening "at scale" and wasting large enough amounts of resource that it starts to equate to real-world dollars being lost/wasted. Sure, users bear some responsibility for not being scammed, but that doesn't mean that Google has to tolerate it happening through their services and infrastructure, especially not when their own end user license agreements for those services actively prohibit such usage.

That is the problem. google does not deem this spam that is on their platform to be enough of a cost to justify trying doing more to stop it. It's a basic cost-benefit analysis.

Are you confusing google drive spam with email spam? In this case Google is the ISP- as the article said, the Google Drive App is sending notifications to people for this spam. People's local ISPs have literally nothing to do with this at all.

Earthlink takes spam way more seriously than google because EarthLink has paying customers. Most people who use google products do not pay. Google is not going to invest millions of stopping spam if there is no financial reason to do so. That is the cold reality of cost-benefit analysis. There would have to be some legislation or legal precedent in which google is forced to do something.

Google has paying customers for its office suite. They charge for individuals storage beyond the free tier, and their business users pay a per user fee.

And those customers have the right to send porn spam.

It is a degradation of their service. They absolutely should care.

Okay so bear with me. My local carwash has a legitimate crazy person there who tries to sell his flat-earth pamphlets. The carwash tries to chase him away, not because they're the street's "baby sitter", but because he's bad for business. People could go get a car wash elsewhere. People could store their files elsewhere.

Let's assume the carwash has thousands of very expensive customers who generate billions of dollars for it, and many more cheaper customers that generate much less or nothing. And the crazy person is hassling some of the non-paying customers, but it costs google $1000/day to stop him, because he's very persistent. Is it worth google paying $1000/day to protect those non-paying customers or help those expensive customers?

Yeah that's my point, being the babysitter of your platform is sometimes cost-effective, and sometimes not.

>They are not the internet's babysitters

This kind of attitude is why we're all enduring nonstop spam calls.

Contra the point of this thread, Google actually prevents me from getting basically any spam calls.

With the combination of Google Fi and Pixel, I receive very few spam calls. Almost all of them are automatically screened, the phone never rings, and I'm left with a "spam notification," with a transcript of the call asking me to extend my warranty.

Similarly, essentially all spam text messages are identified as spam, and generate only a silent notification.

For the few spam calls that slip through, it's one click to screen the call with Google Assistant.

It's still in google's best interest that someone can use their phones without being spammed by porn ads or blocking Drive notifications.

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