Comment by nautilus12

It's absurd. This thing happens on the play store. I've seen it happen multiple times due to pure mistakes. It takes an appeal and time to resolve the issue, in the meantime you are stuck.

Their appeals form only lets you submit 1,000 characters, no images or attachments. So in many cases, it's hard to even provide proof of the mistake. For example, if they falsely takedown your app for trademark infringement, but you have priority rights in a country or a registered mark, how are you supposed to effectively prove that in 1,000 characters with no images? In one case, we had a decision from the trademark office in our favor, but we were unable to attach it in any way and had to try and summarize it in like 300 characters.

There is no reason in most cases to not provide a warning period and the opportunity to provide evidence and exhibits.

They act so much like a monopoly in this case that they are stupidly making things harder for themselves. Sundar and Google's legal team should take all the PMs aside and tell them they are going to start losing antitrust cases left and right if they can't provide more due process for decisions.

I have no extra knowledge on the subject, but if the flagged website was indeed serving malicious content, the brakes would have to come down pretty hard. If you have a review period you can end up serving malware to hundreds/thousands of people. Don't know how often this happens, though, and what the false positive rate is, it'd be interesting to see.

Reviews would have to be done by humans and humans doing things themselves is bad for the bottom line.

They don't even validate that blacklist entries actually contain an offending URL in the report. That's how much they care.

Because malware sites are practically ephemeral, pop up and disappear on short time frames. A review period wouldn’t do much except let them game the system even better.

That would probably cut a lot into their profits. Automating these tasks even if some people get cancelled wrongly is way cheaper than hiring people for reviews. Hey are so big that losing a few customers doesn’t mean much to them.

I am waiting for the day when this happens to a large company. My company has more and more stuff on AWS. If Amazon cuts us off by accident the damage will quickly go into the billions.

1) Google doesn't want any humans in the loop. Humans are expensive. Would sending a warning first result in more humans involved or less? More. So not gonna happen.

2) Google claims any information given to exploiters of its rules and systems aids the next attempt. So they don't like to give out any information about what AI rule you tripped to get banned.

“We don’t care, we don’t have to.”

Google doesn’t need to do it, so they won’t spend the effort to do it.