And people like you make it easier for them to stay up there in their Ivory Towers. Keep it up.
What if your knee/elbow/wrist/etc brace had a small alarm to go off when you start to overextend it during recovery? What if your jacket had a button to quickly mark precise GPS spots in the field for later follow-up inspections? What if your shirt could adaptively nag people about their posture during the 4 hours they spend seated every day? Heck, you could cobble the GPS jacket together today with off-the-shelf parts; it'd just look strange and probably be fragile/uncomfortable to wear.
As for self-driving cars not involving 'real people and problems,' I just don't understand what you mean by that; could you elaborate?
This isn't expecting "the internet" to do anything, though. It's expecting Google, a corporation, to stop helping bad actors promote their "services".
While Google would love to be "the internet", they aren't quite there yet.
If Google wants to and chooses to, great. But if they don't, I'd much rather see an article warning the public about the dangers of trusting Google ads rather than bemoaning that its easy for bad actors to buy Google ads.
And Google isn't 'helping' bad actors unless they charge them less than others or otherwise create an unfair advantage. Otherwise they're a neutral actor that is a reflection of a failed policy and/or law enforcement problem.
So we get this. Blame google.
Until the past year or so, all levels of government were unable to track down the shady operators. IMO, it's not Google's job to do what law enforcement was unwilling to do. (Now, Google could be extra ethical on this, but why would they be? Generally, we expect corporations to follow law enforcements lead, rather than hold them to a higher standard.)
If Google is practically speaking the gatekeeper for these kind of shady dealers (because it sees both the consumer demand and the bad actors), then the most efficient system is one where Google is given both the responsibility and the tools to do the regulation.
In fact, Google might be in a better position to regulate this than the states are. What should the states do -- individually browse for ads on Google and then call up those places? This still places Google front and center.
This is the same reason central planning is a horribly inefficient system -- yes, in principle you can have the entire economy send their data to the central government, then the central gov't comes up with a plan and redistributes it to every factory -- but in practice a lot goes wrong in putting so many links.
How can Google be expected to do this at scale? To act as an extra layer of regulation that even local government cannot or will not provide?
Whoever possesses the data and information is the only actor who can meaningfully perform regulation. You can't effectively regulate blindly.
Right now Google has the most data, more than the various state and local governments.
So there's really two possibilities:
1. Google is 'responsible' for the regulation, under the delegated authority and monitoring of governmental bodies
2. Local governments retain the responsibility to regulate these entities, but they need the power to compel the necessary data from Google so they can do the job. That requires a lot of trust in various levels: that Google provides the correct data, that there is a way for local government to act on it, and for there be the right social 'API' in place where Google only shows ads from licensed entities.
At the end of the day, these are practically speaking the same thing, except we use different language to describe it. The 2nd possibility has more hops in it, so it's less efficient, but maybe it's safer.
It's kind of like how we do money transmission and terrorism finance regulation now -- the government is nominally responsible for making sure bad actors can't send money, but the only way to do that is for banks, PayPal, et al to send data to the government.
When it comes to unpopular or corporation-unfriendly speech, yes. When it comes to outright scams, no.
I wouldn't call not actively helping bad actors promote their scams "heavy handed", anyway. Are rehab scam operators "marginalized persons" now?
One of the major characteristics of a "scam operator" is this situation: Andy runs a treatment center that only takes Cigna. He gets a call from Bob, who has BlueCross. Bob can either do private pay at Andy's Center, for $20k. Or Andy can refer Bob to Mike's Center for BlueCross Patients, where Bob can get treated for $5k out of pocket.*
If Andy and Mike have a business relationship where they refer patients to each other, and either end up benefitting, they are breaking the law.
* Option 2: Andy tells Bob "sorry, we can't treat you. Try calling someone else."
http://healthland.time.com/2012/06/26/addiction-treatment-in...
>finds that most addiction care is administered by “addiction counselors” for whom there are no national standards of practice. It finds also that 14 states don’t require any education or licensing at all for addiction counselors. The risks to those seeking treatment can be dire: California is one of the states that allows uncredentialed providers, for example. In a recent case in that state, a sexual predator was found to be offering “intimacy therapy” to addicted teenage girls; treatment consisted of sex with him. Without oversight, there’s no way to stop people from preying on vulnerable people under the guise of addiction care.
>Only six states require addiction counselors to have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree; just one requires a master’s degree, according to the CASA report. The main qualification for treating addiction in this country is having suffered from the disorder oneself — a standard of care that would be considered absurd if any other medical condition were involved.
Is there a government database you can query? Does it contain all the valid contact details, e.g. website, phone numbers, so that they can actually verify whether an ad comes from the actual entity.
Ignoring the latter part will just land us in the same place as before.
Hooray for the free flow of commerce across state lines, so Florida clinics can import 75% of their "customers" form out-of-state.
Just by removing AdWords from the equation, Google could reduce per-admit costs by thousands of dollars. (Of course, those costs would likely just go to third party lead resellers, who are in the grey area of patient brokering IMO)
To be clear, the parties behind these sham recovery centers are scum that deserve any and every legal repercussion available. And, if illegal, no Google shouldn't do business with them. But the bottom line reason why Google didn't act faster was because they weren't per se illegal, but more so loophole exploiters.
Policy makers subsidized an industry and, learning nothing from every other subsidy in the history of the world, forgot that subsidies invite bad actors. (Calling coverage of medical treatment a 'subsidy' is admittedly somewhat of a stretch, but in the context of all the medical issues that health insurance does not cover I stand by the label. E.g., German public health insurance used to cover 'prescriptions' for sun and relaxation, until it became abused by people taking taxpayer subsidized vacations. Designations of coverage have a similar effect as a subsidy, at the very least.)
This path we're heading down of expecting "the internet" to protect us from the latest baddies out there worries me on a much deeper level. And I don't see this as a 'slippery slope' argument: this is just looking at existing data points and following the trajectory. The current direction is worrying, without regard for the potential of acceleration. Exploitive ads have been around forever -- from the literal snake oil salesmen to the ads in every newspaper, magazine and yellow pages to the present.
Hard cases make bad law. That's a maxim that is depressingly unpopular today.