  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.
