I think I’ve said it before, but Google doesn’t exactly have carte blanche in my book despite the amount of good they do. “Heroes” on this site are always under evaluation, and Google frequently teeters on the edge of how to acceptably run a business. That said, the recent advertiser boycott is shamefully juvenile  in both concept and execution.

Google, as proprietors of YouTube, are wrongly being penalized on opposite fronts: they correctly disable advertising for sensitive videos, and fail to disable advertising for others where they should. All of this comes down to the logistics of policing the hundreds of hours of video that are uploaded to their service per minute. Should a McDonald’s ad play before a PETA video about cruelty to animals in food service? Probably not, but even the stupidest person I know wouldn’t think the former actually sponsors the latter. Where most of us might appreciate the general irony in such a case, consumers aren’t walking away confused assuming they pay attention to the ad at all.

The general question unanswered here is what Google is supposed to do to fix this. “It just needs to stop,” I imagine the advertisers say. There is no magic button Google can press on their end to make millions of idiots stop uploading terrorist videos, and they already have algorithms and systems in place to try all the same. Countless unpaid interns already have the thankless task to manually review user-flagged content on the  gargantuan video platform, and I honestly weep for the things they have to see.

The other unanswered question is what these advertisers are supposed to do with their ad dollars instead. Google’s ad network is enormous, almost unquestionably a monopoly, but who does cutting that particular funding hurt except everyone? Thankfully new legislation in the US allowing internet providers to sell the private browsing data of its users is here to save the day in the form of shady advertising companies lining up for a piece of that pie. They’ll have the advertisers backs, finally.

By taking advertising dollars away from the one company big enough to effect change, change becomes stifled. By putting those dollars elsewhere, stupid and shameless companies like Verizon, PepsiCo, and Dish Network (have you seen their ads?) will actively erode the possibility of improving the impossible task Google will still have ahead of it. It’s like cutting the funding of researchers before they find a cure. Meanwhile shady players, if anyone, stand to profit because everyone loves to hate the big G.