Title
Who Watches the Watchmen: Exploring Complaints on the Web
Abstract
Under increasing scrutiny, many web companies now offer bespoke mechanisms allowing any third party to file complaints (e.g., requesting the de-listing of a URL from a search engine). While this self-regulation might be a valuable web governance tool, it places huge responsibility within the hands of these organisations that demands close examination. We present the first large-scale study of web complaints (over 1 billion URLs). We find a range of complainants, largely focused on copyright enforcement. Whereas the majority of organisations are occasional users of the complaint system, we find a number of bulk senders specialised in targeting specific types of domain. We identify a series of trends and patterns amongst both the domains and complainants. By inspecting the availability of the domains, we also observe that a sizeable portion go offline shortly after complaints are generated. This paper sheds critical light on how complaints are issued, who they pertain to and which domains go offline after complaints are issued.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3308558.3313438
WWW '19: The Web Conference on The World Wide Web Conference WWW 2019
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Copyright Infringement, Takedown notices, Web Complaints, Web Measurement
Journal
abs/1902.05796
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6674-8
1
0.36
References 
Authors
19
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Damilola Ibosiola130.73
Ignacio Castro2819.28
Gianluca Stringhini370161.87
Steve Uhlig453748.45
Gareth Tyson544346.65