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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#121

Post by CPLX »

shadowgovt wrote: post #48
ohazi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's just a convenient excuse. The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is: "If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about literally everything that this company does , then maybe it…

Who is "we" and "you" in this context? At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on…

> the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team

Since legality in a corporate context is not typically a binary evaluation, it would be far more accurate to say that their job is to ascertain the relative financial and business costs of potentially illegal behavior so it can be effectively compared to that behavior’s potential profits

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#122

Post by smhost »

judge2020 wrote: post #119
smhost wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the policy that the Biden team is trying to change. Following from what you said, do you expect Google to change its behavior once the natural monopoly policy loophole gets fixed?

> That's the policy that the Biden team is trying to change. Source? the FAAMG plan with horizontally scaling the business into more markets is ultimately "benefit the consumer", so disallowing such expansion is effectively making products worse (for the majority; the minority customers unhappy with the new FAAMG-backed competing product do indeed suffer). If this policy is that narrow, they'll just slow acquisitions…

You justified natural monopolies in your first comment.

What do you think Biden meant when he said "capitalism without competition isn't capitalism"?

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#123

Post by hlau »

dredmorbius wrote: post #105
AlbertCory wrote: post #46

I was in Google Ads from 2008-2010. At that time, there was a limit of 3 top ads and 8 right-hand-side ads. The top ads generated the vast bulk of the revenue. They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user to distinguish an ad from a search result. I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The entire first page was…

I very rarely click on Google Web Search ads. I very rarely use Google Web Search. Poor relevance and ubiquitous tracking is a key condern. But the ad-spamming is also tremendously out of hand. I'd switched to Google from AltaVista in 1999. I ditched GWS effectively by 2013. Yes, I'll still occasionally run a "!g" bang search. And there are Google services I find genuinely useful --- Google Books and Ngram Viewer mos…

Really surprised to hear that you’re not getting the relevance out of Google. Are most of your searches in a specific domain that’s somehow not covered properly by Google? And is there a search engine that does a better job for you? I’ve tried using services like DDG and find myself falling back to Google more often than not.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#124

Post by AlbertCory »

azalemeth wrote: post #87
AlbertCory wrote: post #46

I was in Google Ads from 2008-2010. At that time, there was a limit of 3 top ads and 8 right-hand-side ads. The top ads generated the vast bulk of the revenue. They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user to distinguish an ad from a search result. I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The entire first page was…

And, simultaneously, I've switched search engines to DDG (something I last did in the mid 1990s -- to Google!), and have multilayered network, browser, and hosts-file level adblocking. Such is the price of progress...

DDG is pretty good and it's my first try for searching.

Occasionally Google is still better. Just today, I was looking for old financial data on Synoptics (late 80s). Google has books & journals from back then; DDG does not.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#125

Post by smhost »

jollybean wrote: post #110
smhost wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't follow. You can read it in the exact opposite direction, that every other company culture is already behaving as if it is a monopoly.

It's much more simple once you realize that 'language is not reality'. People can use all sorts of language, colloquially, and it can be interpreted in many ways. You could absolutely use language within the company like 'crush the competition' wherein the culture is fully product oriented, great quality, support etc. and 'win the market'. That's perfectly legal and frankly ethical. Legal's job is to protect from scr…

"Language is not reality" is the problem at stake, because language is really how people and organizations think. Language structures the field of possible self-justifications, and it's the ruler against which behaviors are measured. But, like you said, the fact that monopoly-related language is prohibited doesn't change reality. All the prohibition does is that it stops the organization's (and regulators') ability to measure its behavior against possible self-justifications. It's a strange legal technology.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#126

Post by phkahler »

bogwog wrote: post #85
tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

At what point does *market share* not become a KPI? At what point does market share become so irrelevant, that you stop tracking it altogether in your entire multibillion-dollar megacorp, and make your employees stop talking about it? Answer: When you become a monopoly (or are on your way there), and need to hide from regulators. That's the point where the market becomes irrelevant, so tracking market share is nothin…

>> The "improve life for customers" stuff is all fluff that you might read in a training manual alongside photos of happy employees playing ping pong at work.

I'd say Google is redefining the word "customers". What they really mean is users. Customers are traditionally those who pay for products or services. I'm sure Google also makes things easy for those who pay them, but that's not who they mean by "customers".

If I'm not mistaken the GoogleSpeak word for "companies we extort money from to maintain relevance in search results" is probably "partners".

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#127

Post by CrazyCatDog »

yakubin wrote: post #67
tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. The lawn mower would like to have a word with you: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040 >

Reference is not until about the 38:30 mark, link starts sooner but provides greatly amplifying context!

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#128

Post by judge2020 »

smhost wrote: post #122
judge2020 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the policy that the Biden team is trying to change. Source? the FAAMG plan with horizontally scaling the business into more markets is ultimately "benefit the consumer", so disallowing such expansion is effectively making products worse (for the majority; the minority customers unhappy with the new FAAMG-backed competing product do indeed suffer). If this policy is that narrow, they'll just slow acquisitions…

You justified natural monopolies in your first comment. What do you think Biden meant when he said "capitalism without competition isn't capitalism"?

> What do you think Biden meant when he said "capitalism without competition isn't capitalism"?

Until we see some antitrust action that's an actual breakup and not 'locked down devices that aren't game consoles need to allow third party App Stores' we won't know the actual extent to which Biden is serious about doing anything to natural horizontal monopolies.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#129

Post by jollybean »

easton wrote: post #104
jollybean wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that because it's probably illegal. Execs have to keep copies of things they write around. EDIT: For those who are wondering, here is a quick summary [1]. Eric Schmidt's emails are definitely kept around a very long time, for very legal reasons, and whatever he happens to do with his own personal 'inbox' is not relevant to the subject at hand, and amounts to a kind of personal email/habit choice. To suggest '…

Execs themselves don’t, they just have to be kept around. The policies are most likely enforced through Gmail’s retention settings which are set by IT, who can view all of the mail (regardless of whether it was deleted from the user’s mailbox) in Vault.

Yes, of course, 'execs' don't manage anything on their own, but the OP is talking about 'email retention' in the context of litigation and discovery i.e. 'a copy' irrespective of label, which is a legal requirement.

Eric Schmidt is not deleting his emails after 72 hours for the reason you mentioned and certainly the company is not, which is the salient issue.

One could say 'oh that's just from his inbox' but that's pointless in the context of this conversation because we're talking about 'If the corporation has a copy or not' i.e. 'IT' etc..

Scmidt deleting maybe a local copy after 72 hours doesn't really have anything to do with anything other than his personal email habits.

[1] https://www.spamtitan.com/web-filtering/email-retention-laws...

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#130

Post by [deleted] »

kyrra wrote: post #33
refenestrator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working there in the first place limits thought. Nobody wants to think of themselves as part of the problem. The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a little easier.

Googler, opinion is my own. When I started at Google in 2015, in my first week here chatting with some peers, some of them were complaining about some of our policies around Android and that they much preferred Apple (the person didn't work anywhere near Android, but was complaining about it more as a user). There are many people at Google that have issues with various parts of Google's businesses. Some are more voca…

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