Videolan: Google refuses to take down or unlist domains with tons of malware

President of VideoLAN here.<p>The issue is two-fold here:<p>- On Google Search, Google refuses to unlist websites that are clearly promoting adware, spyware and violating the brands of Open Source projects (VLC is not the only one impacted).<p>In addition, the ads reported are never deleted.<p>- On Google Chrome, the safe browsing team refuses to flag some websites, even after long explanations about what the binaries are doing. One of the reason is that &quot;the binaries are too big&quot; (sic.). The other reason, is that they scan only the installer, and of course, the installer downloads other things.<p>This has been going on for years, at least 10.<p>One of the most egregious one is VLC.de which inundates the German web.<p>The thing is that it&#x27;s not that they steal traffic (why would we care), it is that they install spyware, adware or other rootkits, all the time.<p>This is why I say that Google Safe Browsing is a total joke, and that Google does not care about its users security.

Meanwhile the other day I did a Google takeout of my Photos and when I clicked the download link, Google warned me about malware on their own *.googleapis.com domain<p>I think an ML black box is getting out of control

What am I missing here? Why is google involved with this? Normally, you contact the abuse contact in the domain&#x27;s whois or the IPs abuse contact. If they are on a bullet proof host, your only avenue for a take down is government agencies. (Edit: you can also ask the RIR to reclaim the subnet but I&#x27;ve never heard of that actually being done for reasons I am not fully sure about)<p>What does google have to do with content take down? Even for delisting them from results you have other search engines people use and threat actors can and do use redirectors when that becomes an issue. It is whack-a-mole, best they can do is beat the TA&#x27;s SEO unless they have a lot of time and resources.

They&#x27;re too busy delisting domains that follow the law to actually do anything of public worth.

I found a job for Darl McBride that would finally make him useful for the society at large. He should found a company whose sole aim would be suing Google for refusing to deal with DMCA requests filed by Videolan (and possibly other open source projects facing the same problem) on time. Easy money.

Google complicit in refusing to take down misinformation? I don&#x27;t believe it.

Alternatively: Google prefers not to adjudicate on any given dispute any 2 parties with a website might have.

Just baselessly accuse the website of hosting death threats. That will get it taken down.