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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

#31

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

gniv wrote: post #26

Isn’t this standard practice in big corps? These trainings are usually contracted to third parties and they tend to have similar content with small customizations for each company.

It's standard practice to tell employees things like "you shouldn't discuss these sensitive topics over email" or "we're philosophically opposed to lock-in so don't say our users are locked in". But I've worked in a couple of big tech corps, and I don't remember ever being handed a specific list of euphemisms I should use. (After all, what's the point of the euphemisms if an official document describes what they really mean?)

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

#32

Post by flak48 »

I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies.

Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking.

Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a monopoly and not a monopoly by simply increasing the definition and size of the market that the company is operating in. (And how companies will generally try to avoid being classified as monopolies this way)

e.g. Google is a monopoly if you consider online advertising as the market, but if you stretch the market to all advertising (including print, radio, TV and billboards), Google might not be considered one.

Similarly Amazon in the e-commerce market vs general retail.

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

#33

Post by DSingularity »

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…

What? Why don’t they fork internal dependencies or push the developers of the infrastructure to support the dependent projects?

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

#34

Post by cortesoft »

nxc18 wrote: post #30

I wonder where the line is. Is it ok for a startup like slack to attempt to 'kill email'? Is it ok for a startup like Slack to try to 'destroy' email? What about destroying Outlook specifically? I'm also wondering to what degree this would apply if Google didn't have so many products; would it be ok for Gmail employees to destroy Outlook if Gmail was its own company, separate from all the rest? As a personally compet…

It is ok for a startup to want to 'kill' competitors. Regulators don't care if companies WANT to establish a monopoly.

They only care if they succeed.

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

#35

Post by BurningFrog »

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-...

I think the main message is “Assume every document will become public.”

It's not a natural thing to think about when messaging with a teammate.

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

#36

Post by Aunche »

Anyone who has ever worked in trading in the past decade should be familiar with these sort of rules. Anything that you say that can remotely be interpreted as manipulating the market will get you written up or possibly fired. It could be something as innocuous as "Tesla's valuation is insane right now."

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

#37

Post by shadowgovt »

Retric wrote: post #29
shadowgovt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prote…

Presumably spinoffs would end up with their own copy of all software infrastructure, which would evolve independently at that point.

I'm not sure that's presumable. It sounds like a better way to do things in the short run (in the long run, there's a net loss from the loss of the cross-pollination benefits of security and best-practice on the backend that Google enjoys now).

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

#38

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

akersten wrote: post #11
shadowgovt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it also has the desirable side effect of heading off writing colorful things that look bad if leaked to the public. A classic example is Microsoft's "knife the baby" moment back in the late '90s: https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/06/were_talking_about_kn...

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

#39

Post by dmitriid »

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…

> perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce.

I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. Google kills those products because:

- they are not profitable enough (profitable enough for Google)

- they don't drive engagement and ad sales enough (once again, not enough for Google)

- it offers no promotion paths for people who may run them, so it's hard to recruit internally (as many posts have shown, development of new shiny things, however superficial, is rewarded, maintaining is not)

And "spinning something off" is not a simple task in itself and will most likely cost more money than just shutting a product down.

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

#40

Post by cortesoft »

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…

Yeah, I feel like people are making a bigger deal out of this than it deserves.

This is just sound legal advice; don't say things in writing that can be taken out of context.

Google might be guilty of anti-trust behavior, and it is ok to be upset at them for that.

These guidelines, however, are not indicative of anti-trust behavior.

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