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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Simple legislative fix: entitle the victim (small business) to quickly and easily claim a trademark infringement on an ad, and claw back 100% of Google's revenue on that ad. And let Google be civilly liable, if they choose to contest such a trademark claim and they're in the wrong.

Inspired by YouTube's DMCA claim system (or my superficial understanding of it). If there's a "bug bounty" on fraud, there will be an enthusiastic market for identifying it. If ad fraud doesn't reliably pay, the fraud market will be disincentivized. Finally, Google itself will have incentives less mis-aligned with its users'; its current incentive system being "the fraudsters pay us more; therefore we love fraud!"

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> If there's a "bug bounty" on fraud, there will be an enthusiastic market for identifying it.

Not to mention a cottage industry of creating then "solving" the ad fraud. I imagine Google's solution for this would be 100% Yelp.

The FTC has jurisdiction here. No new law is required. Complaints need to be made.

I think the "fix" proposed here is that it be as frictionless as sending a DMCA notice. Is what you're talking about that easy?

Sounds like we need scammy middleware between regular people and the complaint system to keep complaints flowing, monetize later!

It is easier than sending a DMCA notice.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/faq

If a real and thorny problem seems to have a trivial answer.. there's a good chance the trivial answer is incorrect.

Amazon has a system like this, where you can "claim" listings. It's how scam products get all those five star reviews for some other profuct. They find a t-shirt or some little thing doing well and file claim after claim until they win the listing.

> If a real and thorny problem seems to have a trivial answer.. there's a good chance the trivial answer is incorrect.

Two of my favorite H. L. Mencken quotes:

"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

And this one:

"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."

-Lyndon B. Johnson

Law makers seem to universally ignore the unintended consequences of the laws they propose or endorse.

I wish there were a requirement to list all the foreseeable consequences of any law that's proposed, both positive consequences and negative ones.

> I wish there were a requirement to list all the foreseeable consequences of any law that's proposed, both positive consequences and negative ones.

Please enumerate all the positive and negative consequences of your requirement!

"all the foreseeable consequences"

If this was feasible why wouldn't you do this for every decision in life.

For major life decisions, I do. Don't you?

Public policy affects millions of lives. I don't think enumerating 1st order or 2nd order effects is too onerous. And if it is, that's why government officials have assistants and interns.

Ironic, coming from LBJ.

Why ironic? Honest question. I do not know enough about the career of LBJ to get it. My understanding is that he was an extremely effective legislator. A bit of a bastard, but very effective.

Some of the legislation he pushed through, mostly in the Great Society program, could be poster children for "the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation".

Yea, this is the answer. If it’s easy to file a complaint, scammers will just file a million complaints to (wrongly) win 1%, and walk away with the $

Well, even if it’s hard… look at accident attorneys in the US. They might not technically be scammers, but man does it feel close to it.

The DMCA shields content providers from copyright liability. What you’re probably thinking of is YouTube’s voluntary ContentID system and related policies that they started doing to make Viacom happy. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the DMCA.

Broadly speaking, when someone infringes trademark, they are entitled to the damages done, which are likely much greater than the ad revenue here.

This is already illegal. Mom and Pop businesses don't have the resourced to wage legal battles and in the time it would take to get an injunction, the scam has more than paid for itself. The solution here is for Amex and Google to do their jobs properly.

Since lot of sme are impacted, could they join and sue ? I am not an American so could be wrong here - could class action suites be of help here ?

They could maybe form a class action suit but those take ages too. The legal system isn't the solution here.

How is it a solution to say that successful businesses should voluntarily shave their profits? Why do we look to these disreputable actors to reform themselves?

Simple legislative fix

Unless you have a magic wand, simplicity usually masks conflicting incentives backed by lots of political, financial, and legal capital. It's like looking at a war and saying 'why don't people just stop fighting, because peace would be nicer.'

The social default is to look at problems as examples of individual deviance from a principled ideal. It's more instructive to look at them as examples of resource mobilization in contested/conflicted spaces. The italicized words are terms of art in social science that represent two prominent schools of thought (which are themselves in competition).

Any chance you have model legislation (for me to use)?

Two years ago, I got fluffed up about scammers claiming unclaimed businesses. Like the food delivery startups (like Doctorow mentions).

I started talking to my reps (city council, state) but haven't gotten any further. And I don't know where to start drafting the legislation.

With some sort of resolution or model legislation, I can shop it around, get the ball rolling. Like chamber of commerce, some scammed businesses, my representatives.

Thanks.

Google is already fairly strict this, at least for bigger company trademark keywords. It falls through the cracks with you are talking about SMBs.

Or in other words, Google is not strict with this, but goes out of its way to protect other big business

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