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

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

#151

Post by kube-system » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #144

kube-system wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By context -- I am referring to the legally relevant context: use in trade. Google doesn't sell apparel, and they certainly don't sell apparel that is labelled 'Nike'.

Contrary to popular misconception, trademarks are not an exclusive right to a use word. They are an exclusive right to use a word for identification of a business' goods or services pertaining to particular trade.

If Google does not use the 'Nike' mark specifically to engage in one of the trades that Nike holds that trademark for, they are not infringing on the mark.

There may be another reason that Google's behavior here is not legal, but trademark infringement is not it.

Entertaining example of how trademarks are contextually scoped to a particular trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#/media/File:LinuxWas...

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

#152

Post by jackfoxy » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #89

jackfoxy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth noting when Standard Oil was broken up John D. Rockefeller's net worth went up. The sum value of the new oil companies soon exceeded the value of the old monolith. Also for reasons I cannot explain, investors happily watch the failed conglomerate model re-invented time and time again, even though history shows conglomerates running their divinions into the ground.

Be careful not to confuse monopolies with conglomerates. You're right conglomerates mismanage (usually neglect) some divisions, but that wasn't the case with Standard Oil. Esso wasn't a neglected divison; oil is oil. The new companies being more valuable is interesting. It helped that they were regional monopolies. Maybe people thought the added competition drove growth on its own. Maybe the new companies became crow…

I didn't imply Standard Oil was a conglomerate or that conglomerates are monopolies. How did you parse that? Alphabet on the other hand has characteristics of both.

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

#153

Post by spanhandler » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #148

spanhandler wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Oh, I know. I never, ever click ads even if they appear to (ultimately) go where I want, for exactly that reason, plus not wanting to give Google more scam-money. No one but us computer nerds know that, or should have to know that, though. (I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here)

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

#154

Post by bsanr2 » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #85

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…

This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.

>Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company

Gentle reminder that thisbis partly because Google isn't fairly compensating the people actually producing the value it accrues to itself: the users.

They could start by having accessible customer service.

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

#155

Post by dodobirdlord » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #103

dodobirdlord wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.

I remember back when I was an industry analyst talking to someone at IBM about some initiative other. And one of the things he said--I might not have the number/metric quite right but the idea is the important thing--was that if an initiative isn't going to bring in a billion dollars, it just doesn't move the needle enough to bother with. Every little project takes some number of cycles from everyone up the managemen…

As someone else mentioned elsewhere, Google has serious data security and privacy requirements to contend with. The “up the chain cycles” consumed by a small project are massively exacerbated when everything has to be done in a way that won’t open the company to risk of Chinese cyberattack or massive EU fines. Projects have to be large enough to justify the effort to build them to extremely high quality, because anything low-quality is a risk that outweighs any potential benefit.

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

#156

Post by mmm_grayons » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #107

crdrost wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and it’s also a culture thing. If you are operating in the Valley then you get startupy folks who really think in terms of “that’ll crush our competition”... Maybe that is an intrinsic sort of motivation, talking to yourself like that? But it’s not a great culture for the company as a whole because it creates an implicit assumption of a zero-sum game. Like strategically you want to instead be saying something…

they can have that space and we are going to differentiate ourselves by leading in this other space Be careful with this one. It can be illegal to agree not to compete (INAL).

Could you elaborate on this? How would it be illegal to target a different market?

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

#157

Post by tomerico » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

Even analysts believe that Google's sum-of-its-parts is larger's than the whole. https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-stock-is-worth-35-...

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

#158

Post by judge2020 » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

Nginx487 wrote: post #129

I know this is not much, but when I joined de-Googlefication initiative, I felt it's a right thing to do. Firefox with uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo, Lineage OS on the smartphone. When I have to use Google products, say Maps or YouTube,I do it from separate "compartment". It's not that much. But when I stopped feeling like I'm a victim of strangely sophisticated, odd and dystopian evil, openly claiming "we are the intern…

I don't see how this is relevant to the article. Does every submission referring to Google need a thread about how to stop using their products?

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

#159

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #124

jacquesm wrote: post #64

I'll help out here with a much simpler definition: A monopoly is a company that you can not avoid doing business with. Microsoft, Google -> monopolies. Apple -> not yet. That way we can save us all some time debating how many angels can dance on a pin. Note that both Google and Microsoft have worked very hard to make it that way, it is only fair that they should accept the flip side of that coin. If you break email t…

I think Apple is probably the least-worst-offender amongst the FAANG group right now, but I'd definitely argue Apple is a monopoly by this definition. Nearly every business industry has to have an app these days. Imagine a bank not having mobile banking available from iOS in the United States. They'd literally lose customers over it. So for many industries, you must have an iOS app, and to have an iOS app, you must g…

See that other thread on the homepage right now. Hes, they are the least-worst but that does not make them close to good.

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

#160

Post by bravo22 » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #146

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 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 ag…

You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism. In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power"? Is it in the free market? Is it in the competition? Is in the decentrlization?