I think the easiest thing to do would be to pass a law or regulation requiring companies to be responsible for the ads shown on their sites. If, say, the NYTimes is promoting scams (they are) they should be fined or worse.
I expect a decent percentage is total BS and too big to get rid of without messing with their quarterly numbers.
Of course, it would be pretty simple for google to prevent through a sort of advertiser FICO score. But they don’t, because it would make then less money.
They just care whether the check clears.
Of course, this will cost money, both because it will cost them legitimate customers that get caught up in the friction and because implementing the measures/reviews has costs, so they will only do it if forced. If they can just externalize the cost (in the form of scam victims getting hurt by scams) and/or can profit from the scams without sufficient downsides, they're going to do just that...
Google and all the tech companies need to be held to account for this shit. Facebook in 2024 estimated as much as 10% of their revenue, $16 billion, would come from scams and ads that should be banned on their platform, and everyone suffers for it. I call bullshit on the notion that they can't afford to do better because scale. Spend some of those billions of dollars on human review. Spend some of those billions of dollars remunerating the people who get scammed through your platform. If you can't afford to keep running your advertising business after that, then it gets shut down, there's no inherent right to the monopoly on advertising that Google has had for over a decade.
Stop making excuses for companies worth trillions of dollars.
But this is not how actual FICO scores work, and more interestingly, also not how historically Google has assigned domain authority for PageRank.
In both cases a history of transactions is required. Even if you could just spin up a new ID for a FICO score, having zero or little credit history typically means you'll have a very hard time securing any meaningful loans. Likewise, in the days when PageRank mattered a new domain would typically take a year to build up the authority required to get good results ranking well. Of course there were work around, but there are plenty of examples where easy to create a new identity does not equate starting with a fresh reputation (in fact even HN has the same principle! New accounts cannot, for example, downvote)
Cue a "free speech" court case that the current SCOTUS would happily let slide for a few mil and a yacht ride. Really hope the incoming US gov can pass some regulation putting a leash on SCOTUS's corrupt behavior.
There is also way too much inertia behind it. Large corps benefit wah too much from these scams. They aren't going to cut off such a revenue stream. Our elected officials don't understand the issue enough to do it correctly.
I personally think they should be.
Oh yup. They heavily pushed the FTX scam for the NYT is heavily slanting democrats and SBF's mom was very active politically with the democrats. And these weren't "ads" but articles upon articles as if SBF was the second coming of Christ.
The NYT literally kept explaining SBF was a good guy and giving him a voice even after the scam got exposed.
Thankfully the judge wouldn't have any of that NYT nonsense (SBF's mom was teaching that we should "move past blame" at uni if I'm not mistaken) and SBF is roting in jail.
But nothing happened to those scam-promoters that the NYT is.
Screw that politically slanted publication promoting scams.