I never loved the idea of GSB or centralized blocklists in general due to the consequences of being wrong, or the implications for censorship.
So for my masters' thesis about 6-7 years ago now (sheesh) I proposed some alternative, privacy-preserving methods to help keep users safe with their web browsers: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/7403/
I think Chrome adopted one or two of the ideas. Nowadays the methods might need to be updated especially in a world of LLMs, but regardless, my hope was/is that the industry will refine some of these approaches and ship them.
Block lists will always be used for one reason or another, in this case these are verified malicious sites, there is no subjective analysis element in the equation that could be misconstrued as censorship. But even if there was, censorship implies a right to speech, in this case Google has the right to restrict the speech of it's users if it so wishes, matter of fact, through extensions there are many that do censor their users using Chrome.
> censorship implies a right to speech, in this case Google has the right to restrict the speech of it's users
I don't follow. Even if Google does have the legal right [1], that does not make the censorship less problematic, or morally right. And even if it's hard to make a legislative fix ("You want to ban companies from trying to protect their users from phishing?") [2], that doesn't undo the problems of the current state, or mean we should be silent about it.
[1] This is far from certain, as it could be argued to be tortious interference, abuse of market power, defamation if they call something phishing when it's not.. Then there's the question of jurisdiction..
[2] It's a very common debating tactic to assert that a solution is difficult, to avoid admitting a problem exists.
I know for a fact that GSB contains non-malicious sites in its dataset.