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

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

#221

Post by johncolanduoni » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #209

johannes1234321 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another downside to IETF/RFC/public standard: it's hard to move forward. My favorite example: e-mail. SMTP and IMAP are old and have so many issues. On the SMTP side it is hard to identify authorized senders, which is a reason for spam, IMAP doesn't really work nice with mobile devices. On the other hand there are messengers like WhatsApp which solves many of those issues and allows adding features (for good…

RFCs don't get changed, they get replaced by new ones. Until we find something that is 'good enough'. SMTP and IMAP are now older than quite a few of HN's readers. They could be replaced by something better, all someone would have to do is design it and put out a new RFC. What is true though is that once a protocol is 'good enough and it gains mass adoption that change is hard but this is more to be blamed on human n…

Unless your plan is to change human nature, where the “blame” goes is pretty academic. The inertia is still an issue when going the RFC route, and less of an issue when standards are developed first to fill a specific need for an interested party.

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

#222

Post by esoterica » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #70

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…

Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. I think if you're entombed in the SV bubble, it might not be. But to the rest of the world, it's kind of head-shaking. Maybe it's because of the industries I've worked in, but clarity of communication was valued, encouraged, and even something we had training in. Say what you mean, so misunderstandings don't lead to mistakes. The public relations people were tr…

> I think if you're entombed in the SV bubble, it might not be. But to the rest of the world, it's kind of head-shaking.

It's not an SV thing, it applies to any industry that is under close regulatory scrutiny.

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

#223

Post by lrem » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #212

andrewem wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably true that now (in 2020) Google has cloud services that do everything which Reader needed, but it wasn't true when Reader was shut down in 2013. For instance, cloud Bigtable launched to the public in 2015. (I don't know whether current Google products mainly rely on the public services, or internal near-equivalents to the public services, or significantly different internal services. I assume it's mainly…

Well the point is there is no “secret sauce infra”, let alone Google specific infra as the OP speculates. If we were to claim timing as a factor, AWS was available since 2006.

You really missed the point. It does not matter if the "secret sauce infra" is better than equivalents. What matters is that the code you have is based on it. And since literally everything is based on Stubby, which has a hard dependency on Borg, once you remove the bits of the backend's code that are secret-sauce-dependent you're left with a Makefile ;)

Disclaimer: I work in Google, but the above is easily inferred from the SRE books.

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

#224

Post by pdonis » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #220

pdonis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What will the price be? If you allow Google/Alphabet to practice price discrimination, it will charge customers in richer countries more. You and I would pay $5/month, much of India would pay $1/month, and people who can only afford $.1/month would pay that. If you insist that the price be uniform over all users, then it has to be $.1/month, or whatever the lowest common denominator is. Of course in that scenario i…

Another subthread here states that ads on search are a majority of Google's revenue. Looking at [1], we see the US being 46% of the revenue. So, assume that search in the US pays for 20% of Google's revenue. Apparently Google's revenue is $160B/year. Do you think the US would have 100M customers willing to pay $320/year for search? Or 10M willing to pay $3200? Or, any mixture of that to reach the balance? Dislaimer:…

> ads on search are a majority of Google's revenue

That's not the same as saying that a majority of Google's revenue pays for making search work. The relevant question is whether search as an application, regardless of what else Google wants to spend revenue on, could bring in enough revenue from users to pay for itself.

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

#225

Post by throwaway2048 » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

dilippkumar wrote: post #46

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…

> Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. There are probably many Googlers here who have sacrificed huge portions of their life and time getting the Google infrastructure to work. Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane. Personally, I’d rather not build anything than hav…

If you think Google isn't deeply involved in politics already, you are fooling yourself.

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

#226

Post by edmundsauto » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #119

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…

> Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully It's worse than that, Google releases products for free killing competitors in the markets they enter, and once those competitors are gone, Google pulls their products.

I feel like I agree with this statement, but I can't think of any examples. Google Fiber doesn't seem to fit, or Reader, or Wave, which are the most commonly cited examples of popular products that got killed.

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

#227

Post by lrem » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #224

lrem wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another subthread here states that ads on search are a majority of Google's revenue. Looking at [1], we see the US being 46% of the revenue. So, assume that search in the US pays for 20% of Google's revenue. Apparently Google's revenue is $160B/year. Do you think the US would have 100M customers willing to pay $320/year for search? Or 10M willing to pay $3200? Or, any mixture of that to reach the balance? Dislaimer:…

> ads on search are a majority of Google's revenue That's not the same as saying that a majority of Google's revenue pays for making search work. The relevant question is whether search as an application, regardless of what else Google wants to spend revenue on, could bring in enough revenue from users to pay for itself.

Good point. Good question. Confidential answer ;)

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

#228

Post by phreack » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

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…

Adam Levine mentioned this a few days ago in his column, when reporting on the Big Tech deposition. Bezos basically keeps expanding the definition of 'market' until he basically says Amazon can't be a monopoly since 99% of all sales in America don't go through Amazon, at which point there can never be a monopoly!

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

#229

Post by humaniania » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #143

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…

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

The people who can afford to opt out are the same people who's views are the most valuable. Not going to happen any time soon IMO.

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

#230

Post by munk-a » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #227

pdonis wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ads on search are a majority of Google's revenue That's not the same as saying that a majority of Google's revenue pays for making search work. The relevant question is whether search as an application, regardless of what else Google wants to spend revenue on, could bring in enough revenue from users to pay for itself.

Good point. Good question. Confidential answer ;)

In detail perhaps - but vaguely the answer is that it's not that much money. Microsoft pretty much willed Bing out of thin air and while adoption has been quite an issue it does have pretty reliable results. Microsoft has a ton of money to throw at things but I think - from the ancillary manner in which Bing was launched - that it honestly isn't that expensive on a day-by-day basis to run that sort of large scale search. I do suspect there is a lot of economy to be saved by already having a wide coverage of the globe with computing resources though so I'd guess at the market being hard to enter and easy to sustain costs once you're in.

I suspect Google works hard to keep from letting out how severable and independent their search business is in a large part to keep monopoly breakup calls from getting too much momentum.