The tech industry is locked in an "enshittification" cycle where companies are incentivized to enable rather than prohibit scammers, says Cory Doctorow. Google, Amazon, the company formerly known as Facebook ("this is 'going meta,' so naturally, Meta is doing it too"), delivery app companies (Doordash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats), hosting companies (Wix), etc. Even financial companies (Visa) don't care?
"On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called 'Kiinthaila.com.' We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com)."
"Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it's several of the top ads."
"Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for 'kiin thai burbank' brings up a 'Knowledge Panel' with the correct website address -- on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this -- engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers -- but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers."
"Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach -- Amazon has a $31b/year 'ad business' that's mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query."
"Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud -- when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix's merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review -- but it didn't."
