When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post.
Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.
I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits.
The first point is that of course IBM and other at-risk companies will have training to keep people from writing things that will cause antitrust problems. (Their antitrust case had 30 million pages of discovery.)
Second, antitrust cases hinge on the "market" (as a legal term), so it's not surprising that Google wants employees to avoid using that word. In an antitrust case, each side will argue over what is "the market", and you don't want to lose the case because of a random email discussing the "market". Google's recommendation to say "Area" instead of "Market" hardly limits thought, but it makes a big different in antitrust.
Third, I don't want to go all CLS, but antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical. Even after the antitrust case against IBM ended (by fizzling out after 13 years), nobody agrees on whether IBM was violating antitrust laws or not.
No question that anti-trust is currently pretty much incoherent.
One frustration is that it has morphed from things around consumer harm to a new focus on harm to other ... businesses.
Google downranks some crappy content farm / shopping aggregator - bam - antitrust complaint. Yes, it hurt that business and so helps google shopping - but no one asks - do users like these crap content farms? Same with google finance - I liked it. Now google can't prioritize that - even through I want it and so I get sent to a giant ad laden garbage fest of another finance / stock quote site.
The other issue consumers no longer have any leverage with respect to very large businesses and govt is no where. So Apple can build a very valuable offering by playing "cop" in their closed garden. That is a consumer benefit.
In other words, you individually would never be able to negotiate a deal where someone would let you sign up for their service anonymously, but apple can force that.
They can force trials signups to have full details of renewals (same font).
They can force folks to allow you to cancel subscriptions without huge advance warnings and will remind you of subscriptions in advance. Yes, this sucks for developers, but the consumer is helped by these steps.
Until govt steps in, I'd love for them to back off on folks creating these places where the tons of crap the govt allows on the broader internet is not permitted.
> antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical
Most things antitrust are incoherent and illogical. The unofficial plan seems to be literally to find market leaders who are offering substantially better products than the competition and then attack them for unspecified and likely immeasurable gains. Whether or not we've seen benefits from past antitrust actions, I don't believe measurements and observations of the actual outcomes are part of the debate. There is just an assumption that because they happened and big companies are bad ergo the outcome must have been good.
The article alludes to Google's 92% search engine market share as some sort of concealed monopoly. As a problem, this doesn't make sense! There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone switching to another search engine except the other search engines aren't generally very good. Google is better at providing search results than they are. Or presumably it is, I don't know since I stopped using Google Search a long while ago. This is a monopoly only in the sense that everyone agrees Google is a better option.
The problem with Google is that it is likely integrated with the US intelligence services. No antitrust suit is ever going to attack that; because it is the part that the government supports.
> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers.
At what point does *market share* not become a KPI? At what point does market share become so irrelevant, that you stop tracking it altogether in your entire multibillion-dollar megacorp, and make your employees stop talking about it?
Answer: When you become a monopoly (or are on your way there), and need to hide from regulators. That's the point where the market becomes irrelevant, so tracking market share is nothing more than a liability.
The "improve life for customers" stuff is all fluff that you might read in a training manual alongside photos of happy employees playing ping pong at work.
>> The "improve life for customers" stuff is all fluff that you might read in a training manual alongside photos of happy employees playing ping pong at work.
I'd say Google is redefining the word "customers". What they really mean is users. Customers are traditionally those who pay for products or services. I'm sure Google also makes things easy for those who pay them, but that's not who they mean by "customers".
If I'm not mistaken the GoogleSpeak word for "companies we extort money from to maintain relevance in search results" is probably "partners".
if you create a product thats unique or defines a category you start by having a market share of 100 percent. Market share does not define monopolies. What defines monopolies is the absence of alternatives. Like you know, the postal service to send letters. funnily nobody talks about those.
Which is hilarious, because I remember very clearly when McDonald's was crushing Burger King and the head of McDonald's said, on the record, "You know what you do when your competitors are drowning. ... step on their head".
Burger joints compete in the "fast food" market which also includes fried chicken joints, taco joints, and the like. They also have more broad competition from the "fast casual" market, "restaurant dining" market, and the "food" market.
The question antitrust has historically asked here is the concentration, and the extent to which have they have pricing power.
Healthier way? This is wrong. First, to admit your goal is to crush your competitors is completely appropriate. That is the exact way the market is supposed to work. Thoughts about hiding this inherent part of any businesses strategy is, well, fine for lawyers, but essentially ignorant for engineers. Lawyers are not paid to make things, nor to develop your strategy. They are paid to manipulate laws and the truth. To write ethical issues off as lawyers just lawyering is a terrible way to approach business or technology.
You can win a 100 meter race by having a goal of running sub 8 seconds, or you can win a race by having a goal of crushing the other athletes. It's up to you if during your training you're focused on the times versus on the other athletes. It's also up to you if during the race you're looking left and right to see how fast they're running or if you're just focused on going the fastest you can. I think this is the difference in approach that they were mentioning. Obviously you still defeat the competition as a byproduct of being the fastest, but they are very different approaches.
> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women."
I don't think that's true. I work for Samsung and we talk about market share and competitors all the time.
I mean, why shouldn't we? Being crystal clear is a very good step to achieve a goal. We need to be more honest.
Neither having a child out of wedlock or even with someone on staff, and, quoting Conan the Barbarian have anything to do with anything really.
Sergei Brin pushed the company to invest in his wife's company, had an affair with a subordinate, and probably quotes some other funny things along the way, it might say 'something' but I'm not sure if it speaks to 'competence'.
I'm not sure if this attack on the character of the companies, while maybe somewhat relevant, really speaks to the 'legal posture' of the companies.
"The only thing in my head is a conviction that our fascination with modern technology and the internet may go very quickly. It doesn't mean the internet will disappear - but it will just become suddenly seen as mundane. And not threatening. And quite a lot of it a bit of a con." - Adam Curtis
'Legal's job is much more about language than approach.
They will require you not to say 'crush competitors' because it would be used as evidence.
The issue 'make a better product vs. crush competitors' is usually a more of a strategic issue.
Edit: it's not illegal to want to 'crush competitors' FYI the issue is the language that would point in a particular direction. The evidence of my point is Google's existence - I would argue it participates in a number of anti-competitive practices for which it's very smart legal team has made sure the language they use doesn't support legal scrutiny.
What exactly is the logic here, that because IBM used to do the same thing Google is doing, and because IBM was not a monopoly, that we should be okay with Google behaving this way?
Literally every other company does this. I'm not sure what is the story here - the lawyers are coaching the employees not to put anything that can be used against the company in writing? The author tried to make it about Google for whatever reason.
I agree that others do the same, but the observation that vocabulary somewhat affects thought is still interesting. As an example, the sentence about "defensive rationale" didn't just reformulate the sentence, it completely changed the meaning.
If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition" they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it they also can't recognize it when it happens.
The policy isn't to avoid crushing competition or becoming a monopoly in some market, it's to avoid specifically setting out to do so. Unless Google intentionally slows development/cuts resources, the amount of capital and level of talent they put into products makes "make the product better for users" a plan very likely to result in naturally taking over the market.
Via market share, competition amplifies the rewards of being better. if you make your product 1% better than the competition, you might go from 30% to 70% market share. But to do so, you have to actually gain the market share. You can't just "build it and they will come"; in many industries, someone has to go out and win the market after the product is built. And so a lot of people in companies are really, really, really, motivated to gain market share. That's what increases their share option value, and gets their bonuses. And that's what tempts companies towards lock-in and all the rest.
Public relations has been around for a hundred years now. It shouldn't be news to anyone that large companies are careful with phrasing things and have full time employees devoted to the nuances of messaging.
And yes, when armies of lawyers are routinely descending on your internal communications then it sucks but PR-speak has to become the norm for all. Most people don't like it, but the consequences of not doing it are even worse.
But do the means justify the ends? Most people understand that unethical behavior or concerning actions to get a desired 'good' result isn't acceptable.
But the current approach is to mask the ends, the end goal may actually not be what we desire, e.g. corrupt monopolies leeching off society. But as long as we create approaches and incentive structures that get us to the same ends that are deemed acceptable, then it's just an "undesired side effect" we can handwave away, or so many managing businesses think.
This is such an uncharitable interpretation of the training materials. The material there is not saying "if you want to speak about things that raise antitrust concerns, use this coded language", it's saying "don't do these things, and just focus on building a good product".
Like, the thing here that really boggles my mind: if the training materials had said literally the exact opposite of what they do: "crush the competition, find ways to prevent competitors from competing fairly with us" etc. — someone like the author would write an article vilifying them. (And rightly so.) So the company instead says "focus on our product; competition is good and okay" and … they're vilified for it. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
By this article's twisted logic, any company focused on their product is just engaging in newspeak for thinly veiled anti-competitive behavior. Or is it just if Google does it?
(It kills me to argue this, since I think normally these threads/articles spawn good debate about the size and scope of FAANG. But… this one is ridiculous.)
Accusing interpretations of being "uncharitable" feels really odd when we're talking about communication training material. It's not some Slack thread taken out of context, we're reading quotes from reviewed and crafted material.
Also I don't see how changing "Cut off competitors' access to target" to "Integrate target with Google" matches your idealistic view of "focus on our product; competition is good and okay".
They basically acknowledge competition will be crushed, and are asking for appropriate communication to avoid troubles. It makes sense from Google's point of view, but I don't see why we should be advocating for them in any way.
I think you are reading something into it that is not necessarily there. The slides give examples of things that are appropriate to say and are not appropriate to say. It doesn't necessarily mean that one thing has to changed into the other.
But it is not training material that tries to convey "focus on the product".
It's literally communication guidelines of a profit oriented company dominating it's market in a monopolistic way that says "avoid talking about market or market share, this is bad"
The only way to have a "charitable" interpretation of this is to partake in their game, imho.
Whether it is charitable or uncharitable depends on your subjective interpretation of the intent of the training material. But I think the focus on not talking about market share is a huge sign that this material is not written with good intentions. That makes very little sense.
If the material was written exactly the opposite, it'd almost make more sense, most companies want a high awareness of their market share... unless they're worried about being hit with an anti-trust case.
And so, when it comes to banning phrases like "crush the competition" it's not that
rule alone which is worrying, it's the whole package.
Your argument is also a bit flawed, in that the alternative isn't training material that encourages talking about "crushing the competition". The realistic alternative is that the training material wouldn't have to mention it at all. Either because the company doesn't have a problem with that kind of culture, or because the company isn't close to being a monopoly, such that talking about "crushing the competition" would just be interpreted as healthy competitiveness.
To simplify - if the actions of an entity are bad (or perceived as bad), then whether they are saying truth about those actions or lies - DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL. So yes, indeed, Google will be damned whatever they say, as long as their actions stay the same.
> This is such an uncharitable interpretation of the training materials. The material there is not saying "if you want to speak about things that raise antitrust concerns, use this coded language", it's saying "don't do these things, and just focus on building a good product".
That is a very charitable interpretation of the training materials.
When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post.
Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is not the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.
Every now and then I'm reminded of a) how much of HN has never worked for a large company, and b) how unfamiliar much of HN is with common business and legal practices.
Too many thought leaders masquerading as engineers.
You're being cryptic. The people your criticizing (this might include me, i have no way of knowing) will not be able to learn anything from your reply. It would be more constructive I'd you shared your thoughts so we'd have a chance to improve. What is your point, exactly? Spell it out for us, please.
This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do you want to end up in court years later explaining what you meant?
Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation.
It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some things via video chat, but it’s not about limiting thought.
They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.
That's not just Google though. Most companies have an email deletion policy that auto-deletes emails after a certain about of time, on the premise that they eventually lose all value and only pose a potential liability and litigation risk.
Even U.S. government officials have used private email servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests.
>"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson"—a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments.
The analysis here is so absolutist and extremist it is ridiculous.
Many business have auto-delete for the simple business purpose - when someone hacks your email (which will happen somewhere in a large business) - why do you need to keep all that crap around forever? And yes, people email payroll details, passwords, logins and the list goes on - stop with the preaching about how to email securely.
So you auto-delete, which reduces the blast radius. In most cases folks are not looking at emails past 3 years old.
>There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.
You already completely answered the perfectly standard and reasonable business reason: "to limit legal exposure. "
In fact, this legitimate business reason is 100% the reason for the policy. Increasing legal exposure for no reason is a bad idea, for companies and for individuals.
This is a pretty standard policy at larger companies. Part of the reason is that even if everything in the emails is 100% legally fine, discovery is _expensive_ and gets more expensive the more emails exist.
This explanation was given to me by a corporate lawyer who was trying to figure out whether the same kind of expiration could be put on tickets in bug and project trackers, which would have been even more harmful to institutional memory than an email expiration policy.
You get more of the behaviors you encourage and less of the ones you discourage. The US legal system strongly discourages retaining email, since it rarely works in favor of the entity making the retention decision. And there is no particular reason to keep emails that old, so naturally companies want to get rid of them.
Almost every US corporation with a competent legal department has such a policy, and at a lot of them the period is way shorter than 18 months. I've suffered through 30 day policies before, and it's dumb and not fun at all, but Google is hardly being creative on this point.
So that's what they settled on? Kent tried to introduce it while I was still there and the pushback was so severe they decided not to do it at the time. I think the initially proposed retention period was shorter than that though. I could live with 18 months, but shorter than that cuts into all sorts of business processes including the all-important performance review cycle (AKA "perf"). I do think it's detrimental to the business of writing software though. I quite often search for emails from years and years ago, as well as mail "notes to self" to be able to find them later.
Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled way according to GDPR.
But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google, since they don’t do support ;)
Many large companies have the same policies/training for this very reason. You do not want to put something in writing that could potentially appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Well, I'd say it does. My understanding is that if you're not limited in what you're thinking, but severely limited in how you are allowed to think about it, your freedom of thought is limited nonetheless.
And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours, lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable name and there won't be any lawyering around this.
Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing cult!
I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators to not even think about what they do as "torture", but "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace.
> discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context
I don't work for Google or have much of an opinion on "Googlespeak".
However, that the practice of law is allowed to exist in its current state is an indictment on our society. The legal profession is one that polices itself, has no proper oversight (judges are just lawyers with a more refined superiority complex), raises barriers to entry with a level of zeal only matched by medicine (to which it is not actually comparable), and is also allowed to maliciously and limitlessly wield this power over the people who do real work is a foundational problem with governmental design.
A hard-of-hearing friend of mine got tired listening to videos. He told me that he sneakily ran speech-to-text software and read the text in a separate window.
In a different vein, when I was younger I didn't understand why people preferred phoning.
I as a Deaf engineer rely on written communication. This exposes myself and people communicating with me to «showing what has been said». I am sure that in my career I missed some important information just because people weren't willing to create a persistent record of communication.
My friend «solved» this problem, but I am sure his interlocutors would be miffed if they knew that.
This is what’s known as a Stringer Bell warning[0] and it doesn’t reflect well on the organization who has to make it this aggressively.
Yes, it stands to reason that if you’re engaged in a potentially unlawful conspiracy you need to be careful what you put in writing.
However if this is coming up constantly and prevents you from using common sense words for your regular business operations then it’s a pretty clear red flag that your actions may be subjecting you to legal liability.
The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is:
"If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about literally everything that this company does, then maybe it's time to step back and reevaluate the ethics of what this company stands for."
A company is a machine that is going to do whatever it can to print money, including brainwashing its employees. You and your colleagues are the only entities capable of ethical reasoning. The company and its executive functionaries are not going to do this for you. In fact, they're more likely going to try and stop you.
At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on the table (because that communication is not in discoverable media).
But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable performance tuning.
I was in Google Ads from 2008-2010. At that time, there was a limit of 3 top ads and 8 right-hand-side ads. The top ads generated the vast bulk of the revenue.
They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user to distinguish an ad from a search result.
I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The entire first page was ads and they are not colored anymore (although they do say "Ad"). There is also a Maps snippet which shows where I can buy flowers.
What happened? Well, I can guess: they did experiments, and not coloring the ads produced more revenue. I know from talking to ordinary users that they often say proudly "I never click on ads!" Now they do.
Poor relevance and ubiquitous tracking is a key condern. But the ad-spamming is also tremendously out of hand.
I'd switched to Google from AltaVista in 1999. I ditched GWS effectively by 2013.
Yes, I'll still occasionally run a "!g" bang search. And there are Google services I find genuinely useful --- Google Books and Ngram Viewer most especially.
But the bloom hasn't been anywhere near that rose for a long, long, long, long time.
Really surprised to hear that you’re not getting the relevance out of Google. Are most of your searches in a specific domain that’s somehow not covered properly by Google? And is there a search engine that does a better job for you? I’ve tried using services like DDG and find myself falling back to Google more often than not.
Holy shit. No wonder google doesn't give a shit about adblockers. Those people would be the ones who care about litigation and stopping this shit. Easy to let such a small % of users slide when the other 99% will willingly fall into the ad trap.
Wow, I had no idea because it's been so long since I've been without ad blockers.
Interestingly, I tried the same on DuckDuckGo and it seemed almost identical: some inlined ads, shopping results, have to scroll down to find actual search results. (main difference: embedded non-ad results like wikipedia and news).
And, simultaneously, I've switched search engines to DDG (something I last did in the mid 1990s -- to Google!), and have multilayered network, browser, and hosts-file level adblocking. Such is the price of progress...
DDG is pretty good and it's my first try for searching.
Occasionally Google is still better. Just today, I was looking for old financial data on Synoptics (late 80s). Google has books & journals from back then; DDG does not.
Really? I just did this on desktop and the first two pages were all advertisements for florists. These sorts of links used to be demarked as ads on google search in the before times. Wikipedia didn't even appear until page three. That used to be the first result for a typical noun search.
While looking at the tables of good versus bad phrasing I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading something not so dissimilar to how leaders of organized crime historically avoided prosecution. By not naming the crime, by speaking about it indirectly and with softer language, they hoped to invigorate doubt in a hypothetical jury.
It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry II, who stated off-hand "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
Yeah, but that isn't even a hint of a problem. It would be like observing that Google and the mafia also both use accounting principles to organise their finances.
These large companies are going to be involved in lawsuits, no matter what. Their written communications are going to be trawled through, more than likely. Everyone in the company would have to be a bit simple for there not to be some preparations to defend against legal discovery.
Even if you believe yourself to be completely innocent of any crime, it is still stupid to make life easier for some legal assailant.
It is far more widespread than an interaction with a Google employee. The phenomenon is everywhere. It was distilled perfectly by Upton Sinclair quite a while ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
>It’s difficult to imagine any new flight search, no matter how innovative, winning today with Google acting as the web’s gatekeeper.
Google results are dominated by the Expedia Group (a conglomerate of tons of different brands: https://www.expediagroup.com/home/default.aspx). While Google's practices have definitely hurt, it's a huge business, and probably a larger reason why a new flight search competitor can't get off the ground.
As a customer, it's annoying there isn't more diversity anymore. Generic travel searches are dominated by these brands, plus articles full of affiliate links that are hard to trust.
Thats not Googlespeak. Thats legal protection. Whenever a company is open to investigation you can bet emails will be searched and if something suggesting something borderline illegal is written there it can be used against you. A lot of companiea give such trainings to their employees.
Readit News
Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.
I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits.
The first point is that of course IBM and other at-risk companies will have training to keep people from writing things that will cause antitrust problems. (Their antitrust case had 30 million pages of discovery.)
Second, antitrust cases hinge on the "market" (as a legal term), so it's not surprising that Google wants employees to avoid using that word. In an antitrust case, each side will argue over what is "the market", and you don't want to lose the case because of a random email discussing the "market". Google's recommendation to say "Area" instead of "Market" hardly limits thought, but it makes a big different in antitrust.
Third, I don't want to go all CLS, but antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical. Even after the antitrust case against IBM ended (by fizzling out after 13 years), nobody agrees on whether IBM was violating antitrust laws or not.
One frustration is that it has morphed from things around consumer harm to a new focus on harm to other ... businesses.
Google downranks some crappy content farm / shopping aggregator - bam - antitrust complaint. Yes, it hurt that business and so helps google shopping - but no one asks - do users like these crap content farms? Same with google finance - I liked it. Now google can't prioritize that - even through I want it and so I get sent to a giant ad laden garbage fest of another finance / stock quote site.
The other issue consumers no longer have any leverage with respect to very large businesses and govt is no where. So Apple can build a very valuable offering by playing "cop" in their closed garden. That is a consumer benefit.
In other words, you individually would never be able to negotiate a deal where someone would let you sign up for their service anonymously, but apple can force that.
They can force trials signups to have full details of renewals (same font).
They can force folks to allow you to cancel subscriptions without huge advance warnings and will remind you of subscriptions in advance. Yes, this sucks for developers, but the consumer is helped by these steps.
Until govt steps in, I'd love for them to back off on folks creating these places where the tons of crap the govt allows on the broader internet is not permitted.
Deleted Comment
Because really, when there’s a profit to be made, American companies are there to fill a “need”, right?
Most things antitrust are incoherent and illogical. The unofficial plan seems to be literally to find market leaders who are offering substantially better products than the competition and then attack them for unspecified and likely immeasurable gains. Whether or not we've seen benefits from past antitrust actions, I don't believe measurements and observations of the actual outcomes are part of the debate. There is just an assumption that because they happened and big companies are bad ergo the outcome must have been good.
The article alludes to Google's 92% search engine market share as some sort of concealed monopoly. As a problem, this doesn't make sense! There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone switching to another search engine except the other search engines aren't generally very good. Google is better at providing search results than they are. Or presumably it is, I don't know since I stopped using Google Search a long while ago. This is a monopoly only in the sense that everyone agrees Google is a better option.
The problem with Google is that it is likely integrated with the US intelligence services. No antitrust suit is ever going to attack that; because it is the part that the government supports.
The lawn mower would like to have a word with you: <https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040>
Answer: When you become a monopoly (or are on your way there), and need to hide from regulators. That's the point where the market becomes irrelevant, so tracking market share is nothing more than a liability.
The "improve life for customers" stuff is all fluff that you might read in a training manual alongside photos of happy employees playing ping pong at work.
I'd say Google is redefining the word "customers". What they really mean is users. Customers are traditionally those who pay for products or services. I'm sure Google also makes things easy for those who pay them, but that's not who they mean by "customers".
If I'm not mistaken the GoogleSpeak word for "companies we extort money from to maintain relevance in search results" is probably "partners".
I guess burger joints can't be monopolies.
The question antitrust has historically asked here is the concentration, and the extent to which have they have pricing power.
I don't think that's true. I work for Samsung and we talk about market share and competitors all the time.
I mean, why shouldn't we? Being crystal clear is a very good step to achieve a goal. We need to be more honest.
BTW: (Yesterday-News) "News For South African Looters As Samsung Moves To Block Stolen TVs..."
1998 Idealism. "I think I want to make the world a better place."
https://youtu.be/55jSx4pRZqI?t=1789s
2000 Disaster and desperation. VCs tell SB what Google must do.
https://youtu.be/55jSx4pRZqI?t=2249s
Sergei Brin pushed the company to invest in his wife's company, had an affair with a subordinate, and probably quotes some other funny things along the way, it might say 'something' but I'm not sure if it speaks to 'competence'.
I'm not sure if this attack on the character of the companies, while maybe somewhat relevant, really speaks to the 'legal posture' of the companies.
They will require you not to say 'crush competitors' because it would be used as evidence.
The issue 'make a better product vs. crush competitors' is usually a more of a strategic issue.
Edit: it's not illegal to want to 'crush competitors' FYI the issue is the language that would point in a particular direction. The evidence of my point is Google's existence - I would argue it participates in a number of anti-competitive practices for which it's very smart legal team has made sure the language they use doesn't support legal scrutiny.
Dead Comment
If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition" they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it they also can't recognize it when it happens.
Via market share, competition amplifies the rewards of being better. if you make your product 1% better than the competition, you might go from 30% to 70% market share. But to do so, you have to actually gain the market share. You can't just "build it and they will come"; in many industries, someone has to go out and win the market after the product is built. And so a lot of people in companies are really, really, really, motivated to gain market share. That's what increases their share option value, and gets their bonuses. And that's what tempts companies towards lock-in and all the rest.
And yes, when armies of lawyers are routinely descending on your internal communications then it sucks but PR-speak has to become the norm for all. Most people don't like it, but the consequences of not doing it are even worse.
But the current approach is to mask the ends, the end goal may actually not be what we desire, e.g. corrupt monopolies leeching off society. But as long as we create approaches and incentive structures that get us to the same ends that are deemed acceptable, then it's just an "undesired side effect" we can handwave away, or so many managing businesses think.
Both the ends and the means matter.
Like, the thing here that really boggles my mind: if the training materials had said literally the exact opposite of what they do: "crush the competition, find ways to prevent competitors from competing fairly with us" etc. — someone like the author would write an article vilifying them. (And rightly so.) So the company instead says "focus on our product; competition is good and okay" and … they're vilified for it. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
By this article's twisted logic, any company focused on their product is just engaging in newspeak for thinly veiled anti-competitive behavior. Or is it just if Google does it?
(It kills me to argue this, since I think normally these threads/articles spawn good debate about the size and scope of FAANG. But… this one is ridiculous.)
Also I don't see how changing "Cut off competitors' access to target" to "Integrate target with Google" matches your idealistic view of "focus on our product; competition is good and okay".
They basically acknowledge competition will be crushed, and are asking for appropriate communication to avoid troubles. It makes sense from Google's point of view, but I don't see why we should be advocating for them in any way.
It's literally communication guidelines of a profit oriented company dominating it's market in a monopolistic way that says "avoid talking about market or market share, this is bad"
The only way to have a "charitable" interpretation of this is to partake in their game, imho.
If the material was written exactly the opposite, it'd almost make more sense, most companies want a high awareness of their market share... unless they're worried about being hit with an anti-trust case.
And so, when it comes to banning phrases like "crush the competition" it's not that rule alone which is worrying, it's the whole package.
Your argument is also a bit flawed, in that the alternative isn't training material that encourages talking about "crushing the competition". The realistic alternative is that the training material wouldn't have to mention it at all. Either because the company doesn't have a problem with that kind of culture, or because the company isn't close to being a monopoly, such that talking about "crushing the competition" would just be interpreted as healthy competitiveness.
That is a very charitable interpretation of the training materials.
When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post.
Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is not the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.
Dead Comment
Too many thought leaders masquerading as engineers.
Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation.
It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some things via video chat, but it’s not about limiting thought.
Even U.S. government officials have used private email servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests.
> There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.
So the policy is about limiting the chance of potentially very expensive lawsuits, and has no legitimate business reason? Choose one.
I wish people stopped overusing "Orwellian": the term is so overused that you could use it next to "agile" and I wouldn't notice.
Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours.
>"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson"—a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian
Stop overusing terms you don't understand
Many business have auto-delete for the simple business purpose - when someone hacks your email (which will happen somewhere in a large business) - why do you need to keep all that crap around forever? And yes, people email payroll details, passwords, logins and the list goes on - stop with the preaching about how to email securely.
So you auto-delete, which reduces the blast radius. In most cases folks are not looking at emails past 3 years old.
You already completely answered the perfectly standard and reasonable business reason: "to limit legal exposure. "
In fact, this legitimate business reason is 100% the reason for the policy. Increasing legal exposure for no reason is a bad idea, for companies and for individuals.
This explanation was given to me by a corporate lawyer who was trying to figure out whether the same kind of expiration could be put on tickets in bug and project trackers, which would have been even more harmful to institutional memory than an email expiration policy.
Dead Comment
Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled way according to GDPR.
But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google, since they don’t do support ;)
The training/policies just codify that.
The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a little easier.
And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours, lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable name and there won't be any lawyering around this.
Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing cult!
I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators to not even think about what they do as "torture", but "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace.
I don't work for Google or have much of an opinion on "Googlespeak".
However, that the practice of law is allowed to exist in its current state is an indictment on our society. The legal profession is one that polices itself, has no proper oversight (judges are just lawyers with a more refined superiority complex), raises barriers to entry with a level of zeal only matched by medicine (to which it is not actually comparable), and is also allowed to maliciously and limitlessly wield this power over the people who do real work is a foundational problem with governmental design.
In a different vein, when I was younger I didn't understand why people preferred phoning.
I as a Deaf engineer rely on written communication. This exposes myself and people communicating with me to «showing what has been said». I am sure that in my career I missed some important information just because people weren't willing to create a persistent record of communication.
My friend «solved» this problem, but I am sure his interlocutors would be miffed if they knew that.
Yes, it stands to reason that if you’re engaged in a potentially unlawful conspiracy you need to be careful what you put in writing.
However if this is coming up constantly and prevents you from using common sense words for your regular business operations then it’s a pretty clear red flag that your actions may be subjecting you to legal liability.
[0] https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8
The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is:
"If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about literally everything that this company does, then maybe it's time to step back and reevaluate the ethics of what this company stands for."
A company is a machine that is going to do whatever it can to print money, including brainwashing its employees. You and your colleagues are the only entities capable of ethical reasoning. The company and its executive functionaries are not going to do this for you. In fact, they're more likely going to try and stop you.
It's your responsibility to do it anyway.
At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on the table (because that communication is not in discoverable media).
But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable performance tuning.
They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user to distinguish an ad from a search result.
I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The entire first page was ads and they are not colored anymore (although they do say "Ad"). There is also a Maps snippet which shows where I can buy flowers.
What happened? Well, I can guess: they did experiments, and not coloring the ads produced more revenue. I know from talking to ordinary users that they often say proudly "I never click on ads!" Now they do.
I very rarely use Google Web Search.
Poor relevance and ubiquitous tracking is a key condern. But the ad-spamming is also tremendously out of hand.
I'd switched to Google from AltaVista in 1999. I ditched GWS effectively by 2013.
Yes, I'll still occasionally run a "!g" bang search. And there are Google services I find genuinely useful --- Google Books and Ngram Viewer most especially.
But the bloom hasn't been anywhere near that rose for a long, long, long, long time.
This is insane:
https://i.imgur.com/bdtvyXF.png
Interestingly, I tried the same on DuckDuckGo and it seemed almost identical: some inlined ads, shopping results, have to scroll down to find actual search results. (main difference: embedded non-ad results like wikipedia and news).
Occasionally Google is still better. Just today, I was looking for old financial data on Synoptics (late 80s). Google has books & journals from back then; DDG does not.
At one time, this was the highest-priced ad in Google (idk if it still is), because personal injury lawyers were desperate to get clients.
TLDR: 2 ads, the rest organic.
Top-2 were ads, a maps widget, organic result, people also ask, 4 organic results, people also search for, images, 4 organic, 1 ad.
It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry II, who stated off-hand "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
These large companies are going to be involved in lawsuits, no matter what. Their written communications are going to be trawled through, more than likely. Everyone in the company would have to be a bit simple for there not to be some preparations to defend against legal discovery.
Even if you believe yourself to be completely innocent of any crime, it is still stupid to make life easier for some legal assailant.
When you are tied to the hip to something, you will never change. The network effect keeps you on the same Ferris wheel.
Yes, it's systemic, not just in capitalism, through all of nature.
In cell biology, it's the Krebs cycle.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28219702/
Google results are dominated by the Expedia Group (a conglomerate of tons of different brands: https://www.expediagroup.com/home/default.aspx). While Google's practices have definitely hurt, it's a huge business, and probably a larger reason why a new flight search competitor can't get off the ground.
As a customer, it's annoying there isn't more diversity anymore. Generic travel searches are dominated by these brands, plus articles full of affiliate links that are hard to trust.