Google Safe Browsing incident

For this to be a legitimately backed statement, professional's would have needed to know about the PSL. This is largely unmet.

For it to be met, there would need to be documentation in the form of RFC's and whitepapers in industry working groups which would be needed. This didn't happen.

M3AAWG only has two blog post mentions, and that's only after the great layoffs of 2023, and only that its being used by volunteers and needs support. No discussion about organization, what its being used for, process/due process, etc.

It wholly lacks the needed outreach to professionals in order to make such a statement and have it be true.

There are only two blog posts on M3AAWG in 2023 where it had been used silently (apparently for years), but was calling for support. I would think if it were an industry recognized initiative it would have the appropriate documents/whitepapers published on it in the industry working group tasked with these things. These people are supposed to be engineer's after all. AFAIK this hasn't happened aside from a brief-after-action with requests for support which is highly problematic.

When there is no professional outreach (via working group or trade group), its real hard to say that this isn't just gross negligence on google's part. M3AAWG has hundreds if not thousand's of whitepapers each hundreds of pages. A single blog post or two that mention it insufficiently, won't rationally negate this claim supporting gross negligence.

Why do I mention Gross negligence?, when coupled with loss, it is sufficient in many cases to support a finding of 'malice' without specific intent (i.e. general intent), especially when such an entity has little/no credibility, but is overshadowed by power/authority that is undeserved. Deceitful people that reasonably should know the consequences will go bad, often purposefully structure towards general intent to avoid legal complications and the legal system has evolved. I am not a lawyer, but this paraphrase about gross negligence/general intent/malice did come from a lawyer, its not meant or intended for use as legal advice in paraphrase form, so standard IANAL disclaimer applies. If the that is needed, consult a qualified professional for a specific distinction on this.

The company is more than technically capable of narrowly defining blacklists and providing due process and appropriate noticing requirements.

The situation begs questions of torturous interference, and whether the PSL is being used as an anti-competive mechanistic moat to prevent competitors from entering the market by imposing additional cost arbitrarily on competitors that is assymetric to the costs such companies have with competing services (as oligopoly/monopoly).

There is. It is called ponzi, and its illegal, but in most cases its become indirect enough in the consequences without proper guard rails/accountability that its now allowed by most publicly traded business today (through clever deception).

Generally, it involves three phases:

1st: Front-loaded benefits in CapEx funding meeting customer/investor expectations regardless of cost.

2nd: Inflection point of momentum where CapEx falls off, a brief period where income meets costs.

3rd: Enshittification - momentum/acceleration reverses to the negative, failure of services as the system is continually hollowed out and cost exceeds income.

This is seen in the S-growth or S-adoption curves in business starting to become visible towards the late 1970s and progressively increasing exponentially thereafter in time.

Most companies jettison (sell/off or merge) or close down services before they hit the 3rd stage where the service objectively can be seen as unprofitable by associated investors. The ones that don't are state-funded apparatus.

This concept drives almost everything we see today in modern society and in the market there are parallels and indirect consequences fully described back in the 1950's by Mises with regards to money-printing regardless of its form (i.e. debt that is not reserve backed (Basel3), synthetic shares, paper warrants (Comex), Bonds (with reporting loophole hold to maturity), flier miles, credit card rewards, etc).

The structure and its flaws remain foundationally intractable. This is how you profit and grow bigger off destroying the market. Eventually consolidation leaves state apparatus in place of a market.

No market can compete with slave labor, which is what state-funded apparatus use indirectly through money-printing/currency debasement. Its not considered a tax, and its not given willingly. Its extracted labor.

Those that have lived through these times see the drastic reduction of options in available products that have naturally sieved to the point where shortages are now regularly occuring (for those with a discerning eye). There are a lot of moving factors, but the structure and their inevitable trends are well known structures, at least in certain circles.

In seriousness, the totality of Socio-economic collapse is more probable than a lot of other potential futures, as a result of this. Collapse has happened many times throughout history in relation to money-printing.

Always before, we were not in ecological overshoot for our population, let alone being in this state for 2 full generations. Catton/Malthus paint a grim picture of the outcomes but no one of action pays attention to these things. Its all largely drowned out by the noise of bots.

The idea to segment certain types of traffic to different domains isn't that new. For example segmenting certain mail servers by marketing or transactional types into subdomains was done as far back as 2010, but it wasn't explained in whitepapers until around 2016 or 2017, where there was already gathered irrefutable evidence that reputational systems had been put in place and the rules for those damaged people running small email servers who were being illegitimately blocked from delivery; for years with no recourse or disclosure just imposed cost.

Once they published the whitepapers on that, professionals were on board because they specified what they were looking for, and how it should function. Basic Engineering stuff that people who manage and build these systems need to know to interoperate.

These things need professional outreach that standardizes it in some form or another, that's not a one-off blog post imo, and that must fully specify function, requirement, feedback mechanisms, and expectations of how its supposed to work; basic engineering stuff.

The PSL is just the same thing all over again. Big Tech just starts doing something silently that directly imposes cost on others, they don't say what they are doing. Then when it becomes too costly they try to offload it to others calling for support, though if they only do halfsies in a blog post buried in noise, they are only looking for plausible deniability.

The benefit in doing this is in anti-competitive behavior.

Incidentally, while separating subdomains for email servers has been standard practice for awhile now, recently these companies once again changed the reputational weights for things, and they aren't talking. Now its a whole domain as a single reputational namespace not just breakage at the subdomain (bb.aa.com.). No outreach on that as far as I've seen.

There are ways to do things correctly, and then there are ways to do things anti-competitively and coercively. The incentives matched to the outcomes point to which one that happens to be.

How you do something is more important than that you did something in these cases.

If you as a company don't do professional outreach about such changes or standards, and you arbitrarily choose to require something that isn't properly disclosed punishing everyone that hasn't received disclosure; that in my mind is a fair and reasonable case for either gross negligence (for general intent to prove malice) or tortuous interference with third-party companies businesses.

That question which you mentioned about asking in an interview (iirc) was actually asked in an Ignite interview, but was cut out from the recordings later, and the answer was we can't talk about what other departments are doing. They may have followed-up on that elsewhere but I never saw anything related to it.

It is critically important to know the reasons why things are structured a certain way or happen; in order to be able to interoperate. This is and has been known and repeated many times since the adoption of OSI & TCP in the 80s/90s with regards to interoperability of systems.

Blindly copying what others do is a recipe for disaster and isn't justifiable in terms of cost, and competent professional's don't roll the dice like that on large projects of that caliber of expense.

This stuff isn't straight forward either. Like knowing where the reputational namespace stops, what the ramp-up time (dm/dt) is for volume metrics to warm up a server at each provider, and objective indicators associated with when you go above that arbitrarily designed rate. (hint: non-deterministic hidden states) If it takes a month to perfectly warm a new server up without reputational consequences by an insider that knows, that's extra cost imposed on the company by that platform (whom you are competing against for email services).

No disclosure means starting over every time trying to guess at what they are doing, and having breakage later when they change things.

> reddit...

A lot of professionals no longer use reddit anymore because its a bot filled echo chamber that wastes valuable time.

Moderators there often remove posts regularly for simple disagreement, conflicts of interest, or to remove access to detailed solutions or methodology.

For an example of all that's wrong there, look to that CodingBootCamp reddit. There's a guy that's a moderator there that's been, in all probability, using a bot to destroy a competitors reputation and harass them for years, attacking the owners, execs, and going so far as to harass and stalk their children; while violating the Moderator Code of Contact. Crazy and toxic stuff. ---

You can't ever meet professional standards if you don't communicate or properly disclose interop requirements when complex systems are involved.