How does the fact that most links aren’t phishing links play into anything? Maybe we don’t need AV because most files aren’t viruses? You had enough of a point without this.
Since you used that example...
How would you feel if everyone in their neighborhood got assigned a private security officer that sits in their apartment doorway all day and notes who comes and goes? The company argues that it's to protect from the thieves and fraudsters, and indeed there are always some break-ins or grandparents scammed somewhere. Oh, and everyone gets an officer free of charge - it's paid for by the ads they wear on their vests and that play regularly on their walkie-talkies. Would you trust the security company that all the notes, taken by a person in the privileged position of observing everything in your home, will only be used to prevent crime and nothing else, ever?
Back to your example - AV companies are quite shady these days, and their products not all that useful relative to costs/damage and snooping they do.
The League of Meticulously Documenting Doormen on the other hand is a much greater threat to privacy. We're increasingly in jeopardy with regards to implementing that. The more we don't push back against unnecessary logging, the bigger the problem we're building socio-technically.
The analog would be an AV scanner that sends a list of your files/hashes to a centralised server somewhere, so that the company can target ads related to your file contents (or sell your data...), in addition to warning you about viruses.
Agreed that % true positive is not a factor in whether or not to have a given security feature. But it is merely convenient that the vast majority of the usage of this "link protection" feature would benefit Google/MS and not the customer/user (assuming that Google/MS are data mining, which is yet unproven in this use case).
Is there an antivirus program that doesn't do this? I've been assuming for a very long time that windows defender does, Norton/McAfee/Avast too. I'd be shocked if they didn't