Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

That’s not a bad idea. In general I am believing more and more that businesses that exceed a certain size are harmful for the overall economy. They may be more efficient and generate lower customer prices but they also harm innovation and prevent smaller companies from succeeding.

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.

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.

Imagine a future where multiple big tech companies share “blacklists” of individuals and applications that should be banned across their networks. Your entire business and digital life could be snuffed out in an instant. Already seen it happen, now it just has to scale.

After years of seeing developments like this, getting worse and worse, it fills me with rage to think about how clearly nobody in power at Google cares.

I naively used to think, "they probably don't realize what's happening and will fix it." I always try to give benefit of the doubt, especially having been on the other side so many times and seeing how 9 times out of 10 it's not malice, just incompetence, apathy, or hard priority choices based on economic constraints (the latter not likely a problem Google has though).

At this point however, I still don't think it's outright malice, but the doubling down on these horrific practices (algorithmically and opaquely destroying people) is so egregious that it doesn't really matter. As far as I'm concerned, Google is to be considered a hostile actor. It's not possible to do business on the internet in any way without running into them, so "de-Googling" isn't an option. Instead, I am going to personally (and advise my clients as well) to:

Consider Google as a malicious actor/threat in the InfoSec threat modeling that you do. Actively have a mitigation strategy in place to minimize damage to your company should you become the target of their attack.

As with most security planning/analyzing/mitigation, you have to balance the concerns of the CIA Triad. You can't just refuse Google altogether these days, but do NOT treat them as a friend or ally of your business, because they are most assuredly NOT.

I'm also considering AWS and Digital Ocean more in the same vein, although that's off topic on this thread. (I use Linode now as their support is great and they don't just drop ban hammers and leave you scrambling to figure out what happened).

Edit: Just to clarify (based on confusion in comments below), I am not saying Google is acting with malice (I don't believe they are personally). I am just suggesting you treat it as such for purposes of threat modeling your business/application.