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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#11

Post by akersten »

shadowgovt wrote: post #9
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

I feel like in this case, regulators should be able to re-substitute any of the "good" terms, with the "bad" terms when citing email evidence, since clearly, Google has now shown that phrases like "valuable to users" are synonyms in their parlance for "network effects".

Not exactly. The key idea of the training is that rank-and-file SWEs don't realize that words have legal meanings separate from their colloquial meanings, and they can cause undue trouble for the company and for themselves with poor word-choice. It's more about "Don't say the product is 'dominating the market' when you don't have any idea what your product's percent share is in the market or, for that matter, how 'ma…

Right. People are reading into this way too much, in reality it looks like pretty standard "don't use legalese when you're not a lawyer" type training that I've seen at every BigCo.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#12

Post by bhupy »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

I feel like in this case, regulators should be able to re-substitute any of the "good" terms, with the "bad" terms when citing email evidence, since clearly, Google has now shown that phrases like "valuable to users" are synonyms in their parlance for "network effects".

It wouldn't work because the mapping isn't one-to-one, it's many-to-one. Google is essentially taking advantage of the fact that it's basically impossible to reliably reverse a many-to-one function.

That is to say, you can never know which "good" instances are actually used in an honest way, and which are used in the "bad" way — and justice systems never go on to assume that all "good" instances of anything must be a substitution for the "bad" term.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#14

Post by shadowgovt »

Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

It's not even so much about protecting the secret sauce as protecting user data. Every tool interfacing to the Google backend is a potential attack vector. When the time comes that nobody's willing to bear the cost to keep it updated as the core infrastructure changes, the product dies.

In a world where Google is split up, that'll still be true; it'll look more like "Google CoreCloud has just changed API foo to protect against backflooper attacks; all users must change by Q4 2022." And spin-offs that can't afford the change will kill features or products.

In fact, in a world where individual pieces of Alphabet are required to sink or swim based on their own profitability, I expect more products dead, not fewer. Ads pays for search. Who pays for search in a world where the government has stepped in and divested ads and search from each other?

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#18

Post by shadowgovt »

baryphonic wrote: post #3

Reminds me of Peter Thiel's observation that monopolies lie.[1] Also, IANAL but I can't imagine a memo/training that says not to use certain words because of "regulatory issues" is not itself evidence that Google knows of its own monopolistic status. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

Surprisingly, it's not. It's evidence that Google knows some words are open to misinterpretation, so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words and not stray into words with colloquial meanings differing from their legal meanings (because subpoenas lack context).

If I say I'm "killing it" this week, I'm not committing homicide.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#19

Post by pwinnski »

blocked_again wrote: post #17

> We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says Now that this document is out, can't the government just map their fancy words back to the original word using this doc as a map?

Not easily, because how do you separate the now-two uses of "people prefer Google search?" Sometimes they mean "market share" and sometimes they mean "people prefer Google search," and there's now no way to tease them apart reliably.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#20

Post by shadowgovt »

kome wrote: post #6

We reached the big tech version of Orwell's Politics and the English Language... https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

When it comes to legal jargon, we've always been there. There aren't really "magic words" in law, but there are words that carry legal meaning and the meaning can be misinterpreted when one sees the word out of context in a subpoena'd document.
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