To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by jariel » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

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.

These terms are not 'legalise' rather, they are just specific terms with specific meaning that can be construed by regulators to mean certain things.

G is basically saying: "Don't actually say in writing that we are trying to take 100% market share, because that won't be perceived well"

Edit: for the most part, 'legalese' is just 'precise English', ie words mean what they mean.

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

#142

Post by benlivengood » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

bravo22 wrote: post #101

munificent wrote: post #99

Somewhat tangential, but here's something I see to be a fundamental challenge with capitalism: Two properties that significantly increase the value that an individual business can provide to users are economies of scale and network effects. The former lets them provide more user value for less cost. The latter gives users N^2 increasing value at only N cost. But those two properties are also fundamentally anti-compet…

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to d…

> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically.

What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly.

Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; profit and self-interest are naturally strongly aligned.

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

#143

Post by pdonis » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #14

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 prote…

> Who pays for search

If search is of value to you, the user, wouldn't you, the user, be willing to pay for it?

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

#144

Post by ocdtrekkie » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #137

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am shocked this isn't illegal yet. Basically what Google is doing in your example is selling Nike it's own trademark, with the subtle threat that if they don't, Google will use Nike's trademark to direct to a competitor instead. The idea that Google can charge Nike to be the top result on a search for Nike is a form of subtle extortion, and I'd have to imagine trademark infringement. It's definitely a form of rent-…

Trademarks are specific to context. Someone searching 'nike' could be looking for greek mythology. It's only trademark infringement when you use a word while engaging in the trade for which the trademark was registered The same word can be (and frequently is) trademarked by multiple companies in different industries at the same time.

I would argue that when Google serves nike.com as the top real search result, over the nike.com ad it charges Nike to show, it's well aware of what context it's being used in. (I just tested, and Google does this, exactly. It stacks a pay-for-click Nike ad above Nike's home page, the top real result.

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

#145

Post by dmitriid » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #92

dmitriid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. If Google were actually killing off products for this reason alone, you'd think they'd start building products on GCP so spinning them off would be easy.

That's like saying "Google should build products destined for failure". No one builds a product with the intent of "easily spinning the product off".

And no, building something on GCP doesn't magically make something "easy to spin off". Amazon is building their products on AWS. I highly doubt that any part of their business is easy to spin off because of that.

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

#146

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

bravo22 wrote: post #101

munificent wrote: post #99

Somewhat tangential, but here's something I see to be a fundamental challenge with capitalism: Two properties that significantly increase the value that an individual business can provide to users are economies of scale and network effects. The former lets them provide more user value for less cost. The latter gives users N^2 increasing value at only N cost. But those two properties are also fundamentally anti-compet…

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to d…

> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically

No, it's built around centralization and rent-extracting monopoly power moving from the feudal aristocracy to the mercantile (now “capitalist") class, motivationally and historically. The risible competitive and anti-monopoly argument that bears no resemblance to the facts (anti-monopoly controls were one of the major elements of reactions against capitalism once it had reached it's maturity) was a later post-hoc rationalization.

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

#147

Post by istjohn » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

tynpeddler wrote: post #50

flak48 wrote: post #32

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…

> 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. Only a very narrow definition of online advertising would leave Google as a monopoly. Both Amazon and Facebook make a lot of money charging companies to promote products online.

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.[1]

1. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

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

#148

Post by ocdtrekkie » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

spanhandler wrote: post #132

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very, very confident that this is true. I do not think people who actually know how the ad revenue is generated would like the public to know what percentage of Google's revenue is built on exploiting senior citizens' tendency to click on scammy ads, and trademark squatting such as this. I spoke to a Googler a few days ago here about how a scam ad was being constantly perpetrated against seniors on Google's ad p…

I distinctly remember their experiments with inlining ads "ethically", and all the discussion about that by outsiders, and how the "ethically" part quietly went away and they settled on "clearly trying to trick people". I have no inside knowledge but can only speculate that those early experiments shot the profitability arrow so hard upward, and that every tweak making the results more deceptive did so even more , th…

Bear in mind designers at Google don't even realize/intend the harmful process they're doing too. If a "search page redesign" increases Google's revenue by 1%, it's a wild success... it doesn't really matter if the revenue when up by 1% because more people were "tricked" into clicking on ads. Some of the guilty parties might even just believe they were making the ads "look better".

It's also worth pointing out: Real search results actually go to the URL listed in the result. Ads can be redirected to third party tracking links which may or may not eventually send you to the correct real page. This has been exploited by scammers several times. Clicking the real search result is safer than clicking on the ad.

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

#149

Post by pas » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

milesward wrote: post #44

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…

And people wonder why kubernetes/Anthos is a thing...

umm, what's anthos?

I thought I'm well versed in k8s-onomy, but it seems I've missed this :o And worse, none of the search results are helpful!

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

#150

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

benlivengood wrote: post #142

bravo22 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to d…

> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly. Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; pro…

> What the modern world has is corporatism

No, mostly not (China has corporatism, Mexico under the PRI one-party regime had corporatism, fascist regimes had corporatism; the modern developed world has capitalism with corporations playing a central role, but thats how capitalism has always been and was a feature of the concrete system for which the term capitalism was coined.)