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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#141

Post by m0zg »

titzer wrote: post #32
skybrian wrote: post #8

This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do you want to end up in court years later explaining what you meant? Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation. It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some th…

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.

So that's what they settled on? Kent tried to introduce it while I was still there and the pushback was so severe they decided not to do it at the time. I think the initially proposed retention period was shorter than that though. I could live with 18 months, but shorter than that cuts into all sorts of business processes including the all-important performance review cycle (AKA "perf"). I do think it's detrimental to the business of writing software though. I quite often search for emails from years and years ago, as well as mail "notes to self" to be able to find them later.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#143

Post by roenxi »

dleslie wrote: post #23

While looking at the tables of good versus bad phrasing I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading something not so dissimilar to how leaders of organized crime historically avoided prosecution. By not naming the crime, by speaking about it indirectly and with softer language, they hoped to invigorate doubt in a hypothetical jury. It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry II, who stated off-…

Yeah, but that isn't even a hint of a problem. It would be like observing that Google and the mafia also both use accounting principles to organise their finances.

These large companies are going to be involved in lawsuits, no matter what. Their written communications are going to be trawled through, more than likely. Everyone in the company would have to be a bit simple for there not to be some preparations to defend against legal discovery.

Even if you believe yourself to be completely innocent of any crime, it is still stupid to make life easier for some legal assailant.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#145

Post by seanmcdirmid »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #29
skybrian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have some effect, but Googlers can read all the same stuff on the Internet as everyone else.

Have you ever been a devout practitioner of a religion whose views on the world differ in key parts from the established scientific consensus? Have you ever been affiliated with a political party that was highly popular (or a monoparty even) in your country but was held in contempt by the rest of the world because of how totalitarian/inhumane it was? In both cases, you could read whatever, even critical information a…

Google’s internal memegen website does not confirm that. I’ve never seen anything so critical of Google.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#146

Post by roenxi »

kens wrote: post #116
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…

> 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits. The first point is that…

> antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical

Most things antitrust are incoherent and illogical. The unofficial plan seems to be literally to find market leaders who are offering substantially better products than the competition and then attack them for unspecified and likely immeasurable gains. Whether or not we've seen benefits from past antitrust actions, I don't believe measurements and observations of the actual outcomes are part of the debate. There is just an assumption that because they happened and big companies are bad ergo the outcome must have been good.

The article alludes to Google's 92% search engine market share as some sort of concealed monopoly. As a problem, this doesn't make sense! There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone switching to another search engine except the other search engines aren't generally very good. Google is better at providing search results than they are. Or presumably it is, I don't know since I stopped using Google Search a long while ago. This is a monopoly only in the sense that everyone agrees Google is a better option.

The problem with Google is that it is likely integrated with the US intelligence services. No antitrust suit is ever going to attack that; because it is the part that the government supports.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#147

Post by gugagore »

pc86 wrote: post #138
sidlls wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No rational person is going to see “Area” in this context as anything but a synonym for “Market.”

Especially when Google is distributing documentation saying to use the word "Area" explicitly instead of "Market."

IANAL but it seems that it would succeed in requiring an additional layer of argumentation that “area” is code for “market”. My rough sense is that nothing is trivial in cases like this, but how difficult would it be to argue this?

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#148

Post by tibbetts »

roenxi wrote: post #146
kens wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits. The first point is that…

> antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical Most things antitrust are incoherent and illogical. The unofficial plan seems to be literally to find market leaders who are offering substantially better products than the competition and then attack them for unspecified and likely immeasurable gains. Whether or not we've seen benefits from past antitrust actions, I don't believe measurements and observations o…

Once upon a time US regulators recognized that limited competition and market dominance can be a problem all by themselves, for their chilling effect on innovation. Unfortunately under Reagan the DOJ changed their policy and started arguing that concrete consumer harm has to be demonstrated for a business to be subject to antitrust. That’s a much higher bar. Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco monopoly, and trying to argue that consumers were being harmed because internet access was limited. Who would even want internet access under those circumstances?

The same is true of Google. It’s hard to show concrete harm (though wrecking flight search counts for me) when we have no counterfactual to consider. For example, in a truly competitive display ad market (instead of a duopoly), maybe our civilization would have figured out that display ads are a waste of money and consumer product manufacturers and retailers would stop buying them. But it’s hard to know. This is why we should go after any company that is dominant in any market.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#150

Post by ilaksh »

No one is going to appreciate this but I will say it anyway just because I think it's important and maybe one person will get it.

The solution to these type of technopolies is not better laws or lawsuits. The solution is technical. It's about creating protocols for decentralized systems.

Now, am I saying that it's obvious or easy to replace Google with decentralized systems? Of course not. But what I hope people will eventually realize is that open source distributed protocols are in fact extremely powerful and perfect for creating better public online commons.

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