> Because "we can," executive said in 2016. "Smaller pubs don't have alternative revenue sources."
And 90% of publishers and small websites suffer because of this.
These are more damning than anything that has been said about these companies, because it affects their real business, not the antisocial apps they give for free. Is it even called a monopoly when you control so much of both the Supply and the Demand? It's like a black box telling advertisers "give us your money and we will tell you we did what you think we did".
According to the thread, they're the biggest seller, the biggest buyer and they own the biggest exchange. I can't see anything would go wrong with that.
Regarding companies putting profits above all else, which companies are doing things better, and how we create better cultures, I thought I might have something valuable to add to the discussion:
I work at one of Elon's companies and, yes, he cares about profitability, but I really appreciate the way he frames it, which is to use profitability as a forcing function for getting things done and as a feedback signal about whether you are working on and doing the right things. If you aren't profitable you should ask yourself, "Why don't other people find value in what I'm producing?" Additionally, we view profitability as a mechanism for allowing us to keep working on the ambitious ideas that we care about.
In part because of the people who are attracted to his companies, and his particularly strong influence on company culture compared to most founders, I think his companies have a pretty healthy (thought not perfect) perspective on profitability in the grand scheme of things.
In my experience this is always the framing. The hard part is figuring out when you're being BS'd.
I agree that a strong founder personality impressing their personal philosophy on the company leads to very different outcomes. I think Google's slow loss of its founders' day to day impact over time is very relevant to this conversation.
The bits about the ad auction are all what I expected as a user...
Obviously they can adjust their fee up or down to further their interests. Obviously they have the right to set the 'floor' auction price, and can set it to maximize profits. Obviously they can take on business from Facebook, and limit how much they take on if they like.
It doesn't include stuff about their recent switch to first price auctions, which make many of these complaints moot. It's really hard to make a first price auction unfair.
If there was even a single instance of that, a bidder would know...
Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid. Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was $0.90".
You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is an age. If you can't get your bid in in that time, it's just badly written software that hasn't precomputed the bid ahead of time.
The document says the “encrypted” files were encrypted using keys held by WhatsApp or Google and that Google Drive’s terms of service allowed Google to scan users’ WhatsApp conversations for advertising purposes.
As an user, all claim to defend users and privacy, and users think that they have some features because it is in their interest. But in fact, they only care about their business objectives and would usually screw you if that can be in there interest. But with a very nice sugar coating.
For example, this kind of things explain why there was no backup alternatives except google.
> Google's response - "secretly made its own exchange win, even when another exchange submitted a higher bid," complaint alleges.
Their competitors knew this was happening. It's pretty easy to see occurring when you run a system that competes in Google header bidding for a publisher you also control.
Google being on both the sell and buy sides and the “advantages” of using Google for both were things practitioners just sort of knew and had to live with, like “npm is a mess” and “A/B testing is often more storytelling than rigor“.
I suspect the reason it wasn’t a bigger bombshell is that ad exchanges are hard to understand beyond the surface level “it’s an exchange for ads”, and other ad exchanges were also dirty. Google wasn’t the only one doing questionable things being on both sell and buy sides of transactions:
One of the most astounding things I learned in my time in ad tech was just how wide the gulf is between how much the advertiser pays and how much the website owner gets. It’s one to two orders of magnitude difference, mostly made up in fees for all of the platforms and data and other value add in between.
Well, look at me. I’m an immigrant. My wife’s useful skills would probably give her salary of about 5th of what we need, so she doesn’t work and takes care of the kid, house and engages in her hobbies, like making custom teddy bears.
If I were put on a project like that I can easily imagine being quiet about it as I put well being of my family waaaay above any ethics. I can imagine that a lot of people do.
So the only real way to solve it is robust regulation and good channels for whistleblowers.
above any ethics? You'd kill someone to support your family? Surely not. So there's somewhere you draw the line, you just don't think what Google's doing is that bad.
> How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the user stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and get publicly dressed down?
Legal agreements and extremely valuable employment contracts, most likely.
My understanding is that some (most?) of the developers out there today are in it for the money. If someone promised you enough income to retire by age 31, and all you had to do was keep your mouth shut for the interim, I think you may comply and even go out of your way a bit to protect your employer. This all explains it in my head. Its not that there is some vast, elaborate conspiracy, its that everyone involved is being heavily-incentivized to do the wrong thing.
What about the rest; the presentations the executive summaries… all the paperwork that suits babble around… it takes some serious “terrorist organization” opsec to perform like this
Clarification: I’m not wondering how they managed to keep the human ethics in check, that’s pretty obvious: paying the price for corruption and wrapping it up in legal threats of economically violent retribution.
I’m referring to the technological aspect. The amount of air-gapping, leak prevention, no-more-than-need-to-know protocol, opsec is impressive if they managed so far so long.
Google is known to develop stuff in an RPC-first kind of way. Makes me wonder if higher-ups are able to just write a quick script to do this, without lower level employees even knowing.
These companies need to be broken up, and regulated as utilities where they are not broken up. This particular collusion isn’t the only issue. The real issue is that collusion is a symptom of extreme market power that distorts society in many different ways. It prevents competition, hurts customers (for example undermining privacy laws), and undermines our basic values (for example most of societal speech takes place on their private platforms). Clarence Thomas and others were right about applying common carrier regulation to social media. But for things like ads collusion or illegal hiring agreements or whatever, the fix is simply to break them up due to their size. Companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars are simply too big.
Wow. We've just had a thread on how Facebook chooses profits over people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579) and here's Google complaining that FB "at times" doesn't choose profit...
> Google was frustrated @Facebook was not aligning with it to reduce users’ privacy.
“We’ve had difficulty getting FB to align on our privacy goals and strategy, as they have at time[s] prioritized winning on reputation over its business interest in legislative debates."
> Wow. We've just had a thread on how Facebook chooses profits over people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579) and here's Google complaining that FB "at times" doesn't choose profit...
These are not incompatible statements. Any corporation, once it gets large enough, inevitably veers toward "profits over people," if only in the more benign sense of "if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense." Yes, I know, "goodwill" is a thing that corporations strive to cultivate, but, even the concept of "goodwill" has been financialized in modern corporate finance.
Personally, I don’t care that FB puts profits over people. That’s what I expect. They are a public corporation. FB’s board has a legal obligation (fiduciary responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism may suck, but it’s the law.
Speaking of the law, Google’s abuses listed in this thread are what gall me. In Gulliver’s travels, the Lilliputians don’t strongly punish a common thief. You can just build a higher fence to thwart them. They severely punish “white collar” crimes. Outsmarting those criminals may prove impossible. We now have some of the greatest minds of our generation figuring out how to enrich Google even if it means breaking anti-trust/anti-collusion laws and even just basic breach of contract.
I get that Google is a huge company and not all bad, but its primary revenue model is so morally bankrupt, I question how anyone can justify working there.
Fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits is a myth. It’s something that businesses hide their unethical behavior behind, but there’s no law that requires it according to the US Supreme Court.
> FB’s board has a legal obligation (fiduciary responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism may suck, but it’s the law.
This is often repeated but is (generally) incorrect. There's a lot of writing out there about how this is bs, e.g. [0].
People certainly think and act like this is the case, so the end result is often the same, but this is not good-natured corporate governors being helpless before the law, it's profit-motivated people being ruthless.
> FB’s board has a legal obligation (fiduciary responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism may suck, but it’s the law.
What US law states that the board of any company has to make money for shareholders? I've tried finding it but haven't been able to. So what happens when a company fails? Does the board get prosecuted?
Facebooks - Board of Directors
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Sheryl Sandberg
- Peggy Alford
- Marc L. Andreessen
- Andrew W. Houston
- Nancy Killefer
- Robert M. Kimmitt
- Peter A. Thiel
- Tracey T. Travis
Alphabet - Board of Directors
- Larry Page
- Sergey Brin
- Sundar Pichai
- John L. Hennessy
- Frances Arnold
- L. John Doerr
- Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.
- Ann Mather
- Alan R. Mulally
- K. Ram Shriram
- Robin L. Washington
Well google needs to not complain then when the government comes looking around for anti-competitive practices or when they get broken up. Of the FAANG companies they could all pretty easily be split up easily into 3+ companies to compete in the social/advertising spectrum.
Readit News
And 90% of publishers and small websites suffer because of this.
These are more damning than anything that has been said about these companies, because it affects their real business, not the antisocial apps they give for free. Is it even called a monopoly when you control so much of both the Supply and the Demand? It's like a black box telling advertisers "give us your money and we will tell you we did what you think we did".
I work at one of Elon's companies and, yes, he cares about profitability, but I really appreciate the way he frames it, which is to use profitability as a forcing function for getting things done and as a feedback signal about whether you are working on and doing the right things. If you aren't profitable you should ask yourself, "Why don't other people find value in what I'm producing?" Additionally, we view profitability as a mechanism for allowing us to keep working on the ambitious ideas that we care about.
In part because of the people who are attracted to his companies, and his particularly strong influence on company culture compared to most founders, I think his companies have a pretty healthy (thought not perfect) perspective on profitability in the grand scheme of things.
I agree that a strong founder personality impressing their personal philosophy on the company leads to very different outcomes. I think Google's slow loss of its founders' day to day impact over time is very relevant to this conversation.
Obviously they can adjust their fee up or down to further their interests. Obviously they have the right to set the 'floor' auction price, and can set it to maximize profits. Obviously they can take on business from Facebook, and limit how much they take on if they like.
It doesn't include stuff about their recent switch to first price auctions, which make many of these complaints moot. It's really hard to make a first price auction unfair.
Why was any of this a surprise?
Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid. Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was $0.90".
You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is an age. If you can't get your bid in in that time, it's just badly written software that hasn't precomputed the bid ahead of time.
<<In 2015, Google signed agreement with WhatsApp to give users option of backing up their messages.
Users were led to believe they were encrypted. They were not. @MikeIsaac
Google knew users were mislead. See quotes: >>
https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1452312761342496795?s=21
As an user, all claim to defend users and privacy, and users think that they have some features because it is in their interest. But in fact, they only care about their business objectives and would usually screw you if that can be in there interest. But with a very nice sugar coating.
For example, this kind of things explain why there was no backup alternatives except google.
Their competitors knew this was happening. It's pretty easy to see occurring when you run a system that competes in Google header bidding for a publisher you also control.
I suspect the reason it wasn’t a bigger bombshell is that ad exchanges are hard to understand beyond the surface level “it’s an exchange for ads”, and other ad exchanges were also dirty. Google wasn’t the only one doing questionable things being on both sell and buy sides of transactions:
https://www.businessinsider.com/guardian-takes-legal-action-...
One of the most astounding things I learned in my time in ad tech was just how wide the gulf is between how much the advertiser pays and how much the website owner gets. It’s one to two orders of magnitude difference, mostly made up in fees for all of the platforms and data and other value add in between.
Bingo.
I'm glad to be out, tbh. I built some cool stuff, but Jesus.
How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the user stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and get publicly dressed down?
I guess that’s the one single major threat to effectively WHF: the need for maximum security secrecy and infrastructure control.
If I were put on a project like that I can easily imagine being quiet about it as I put well being of my family waaaay above any ethics. I can imagine that a lot of people do.
So the only real way to solve it is robust regulation and good channels for whistleblowers.
And probably some sort of minimal unconditional financial security denying corporations to practically take people hostage.
Legal agreements and extremely valuable employment contracts, most likely.
My understanding is that some (most?) of the developers out there today are in it for the money. If someone promised you enough income to retire by age 31, and all you had to do was keep your mouth shut for the interim, I think you may comply and even go out of your way a bit to protect your employer. This all explains it in my head. Its not that there is some vast, elaborate conspiracy, its that everyone involved is being heavily-incentivized to do the wrong thing.
I’m referring to the technological aspect. The amount of air-gapping, leak prevention, no-more-than-need-to-know protocol, opsec is impressive if they managed so far so long.
> Google was frustrated @Facebook was not aligning with it to reduce users’ privacy.
“We’ve had difficulty getting FB to align on our privacy goals and strategy, as they have at time[s] prioritized winning on reputation over its business interest in legislative debates."
These are not incompatible statements. Any corporation, once it gets large enough, inevitably veers toward "profits over people," if only in the more benign sense of "if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense." Yes, I know, "goodwill" is a thing that corporations strive to cultivate, but, even the concept of "goodwill" has been financialized in modern corporate finance.
Dead Comment
Speaking of the law, Google’s abuses listed in this thread are what gall me. In Gulliver’s travels, the Lilliputians don’t strongly punish a common thief. You can just build a higher fence to thwart them. They severely punish “white collar” crimes. Outsmarting those criminals may prove impossible. We now have some of the greatest minds of our generation figuring out how to enrich Google even if it means breaking anti-trust/anti-collusion laws and even just basic breach of contract.
I get that Google is a huge company and not all bad, but its primary revenue model is so morally bankrupt, I question how anyone can justify working there.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
This is often repeated but is (generally) incorrect. There's a lot of writing out there about how this is bs, e.g. [0].
People certainly think and act like this is the case, so the end result is often the same, but this is not good-natured corporate governors being helpless before the law, it's profit-motivated people being ruthless.
[0] https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-i...
Deleted Comment
What US law states that the board of any company has to make money for shareholders? I've tried finding it but haven't been able to. So what happens when a company fails? Does the board get prosecuted?
Facebooks - Board of Directors - Mark Zuckerberg - Sheryl Sandberg - Peggy Alford - Marc L. Andreessen - Andrew W. Houston - Nancy Killefer - Robert M. Kimmitt - Peter A. Thiel - Tracey T. Travis
Alphabet - Board of Directors - Larry Page - Sergey Brin - Sundar Pichai - John L. Hennessy - Frances Arnold - L. John Doerr - Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. - Ann Mather - Alan R. Mulally - K. Ram Shriram - Robin L. Washington