Comment by account42
15 hours ago
It's both's fault. Google for making false and clearly damaging statements (libel) and Radix for acting on them.
15 hours ago
It's both's fault. Google for making false and clearly damaging statements (libel) and Radix for acting on them.
(IAAL but this is not legal advice.)
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
I always wonder what the settlement and damages would be if google marked Amazon as a phishing site for even a few minutes.
The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.
I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)
If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.
There is a potentially different cause of action, tortious interference with business relationships. It does require that the defendant intended to interfere in a way that would cause harm to the plaintiff, though. Proving Google intended such harm would be difficult and expensive.
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Marking a website as "unsafe" in Chrome is equal to standing in front of the door of a small restaurant and blocking 71% of people going inside. Everyone first has to agree that they will enter the restaurant at their own risk.
That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.
Yeah. Everyone uses their list and being blocked by all web browsers is like having someone cover the doorway with a massive DANGER sign. It's insane that people are roaming around here arguing that it's ok because the damage caused is a necessity for "internet scale".
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It isn't just chrome. Firefox, Safari, and Edge also use that list.
It's being stated as fact, not as an opinion.
(IANAL) It's not about how it's stated, but whether it can be objectively proven to be true or false. "unsafe" refers to the likelihood of something bad happening in the future. You can't prove that something bad will happen in the future, so it's opinion.
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This seems like a distinction without difference, given everyone in the ecosystem takes that "opinion" as true fact, including the market-leading browser produced by the "opinion"-haver.
I get that's mostly what corporate lawyers argue about, but it's functionally dishonest in this case.