Ah, so you suggest liability for the vendors of the software blocking websites, with, in practice [1], no liability for the operators of a compromised website, if it is phishing/malware?

This is a great approach, if your goal is to optimize for increasing the amount of dangerous crap on the web. But, eh, that's surely worth it, because the profitability of startups is more important then little things like the security of the average netizen...

[1] Even if you make the operators liable [2], in practice, you'll never be able to collect from most of them. Whereas the blacklist curators are a singular, convenient target...

[2] If you can demonstrate how the operators of compromised websites can be held liable for all the harm they cause, I will happily agree that we should do away with blacklists. Unfortunately, the technical and legislative solutions for this are much worse than the disease you are trying to treat.

Since phishing is not going to go anywhere with or without blacklists - for obvious reasons, e.g. lists can't cover everything, and you can't add sites to the list instantly - I am willing to tolerate a slight increase in fishing which is going to exist anyway in exchange for not having Google (or any other megacorp, or any other organization for that matter) as a gatekeeper of everybody's access to the internet. The potential for abuse of such power is much greater and much more dangerous than the danger from tiny increase of phishing.

> I am willing to tolerate a slight increase in fishing

According to Google's most recent transparency report[1], as of December 20th of last year they were blocking around 27,000 malware distribution sites and a little over 2,000,000 phishing sites.

In your view, would turning off those blacklists and allowing those >2,000,000 sites to become functional again count as a "slight" increase?

(edit: That's a real question, incidentally, not a disagreement or an attempt at a 'zing'; I have no knowledge in this area but went to look up the numbers, and am curious whether 2,000,000 is truly a vanishingly small amount, relative to everything else that's out there that's not already on the list)

[1]: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/overview

I'm not sure what is counted as "sites" - i.e. if Google closes foo.bar/baz123 and the same server gets assigned bar.foo/zab345 and continues to serve malware, is it 2 separate sites? Did Google really achieve this much by forcing the changing of the URL? Sure, bunch of people that got the phish link in the mail that was sent before switch but then shut down won't be phished, but I have no idea how much that changes the picture - I'm sure phishers are well aware that their domains are short-lived and already adapted for that, otherwise they'd be extinct. However, I'd be glad to read some field-validated data about how much closing those 2M sites, whatever is meant by "sites", actually helps against phishing.

I mean if we could trust Google (or anybody else of that kind) to have blacklist strictly limited to reasonable definition of malware and phishing, and knew that usage of such list if strictly voluntary under control of the user, it would be an acceptable, if decidedly imperfect, remedy. But we know we can't trust any of this, even if whoever works on this at Google right now are sincerely ironclad committed to never any mission creep and abuse happen, once the means exist, these people can always be replaced with others that would use it to fight "misinformation", or "incitement", or "blasphemy", or whatever it is in fashion to fight this week. There's no mechanism that ensures it won't be abused, and abuse is very easy once the system is deployed.

Moreover, we (as, people not in control of Google's decisions) have absolutely no means to prevent any abuse of this, since Google owns the whole setup and we have no voice in their decision making process. Given that, it seems to be prudent to make all effort to reject it while we still can. Otherwise next time you'd want to make a site questioning Google's decisions about the malware list, nobody would be able to read it because it'd be marked as a malware site.

You can also be certain that these numbers include all the false-positives. One of the Open Source pages I maintain got blocked as well, because too many AV reported one library package as malware.

There's no "report as false-positive" button at Google, so these reports likely have a lot of false positives in them...