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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#171

Post by draw_down »

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.

Sure, it has no other purpose, but I think that says more about our legal system than anything. People operating completely above board can be dragged through the mud. What's that quote about, give me six words from an honest man and I'll have him hanged?

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#172

Post by randomperson_24 »

regnull wrote: post #76
smhost wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is the logic here, that because IBM used to do the same thing Google is doing, and because IBM was not a monopoly, that we should be okay with Google behaving this way?

Literally every other company does this. I'm not sure what is the story here - the lawyers are coaching the employees not to put anything that can be used against the company in writing? The author tried to make it about Google for whatever reason.

true

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#173

Post by jollybean »

alphabetting wrote: post #64
gumby wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours .

Source? Curious what the reasoning would be there. Seems insanely impractical

It's obviously false, there are a number of regulations which would require G. to keep his communications on record for years, which is really established and well understood despite the commons here seeming to disagree with me.

More than likely Schmidt may have said something along the lines of deleting anything more than 3 days old because at the pace of his business, it's 'time out' and not relevant. But that's just a matter of his peculiar communications style. That the label has changed to 'archive' doesn't mean anything really from a corporate perceptive.

So yes, illegal to actually delete, and seemingly impractical to bump from one's inbox, but perhaps at 'Google Speed' there's some reason for it (and maybe there's a big caveat i.e. anything that's 'starred' or whatever doesn't get deleted, or, maybe anything older than 3 days that's opened or unopened gets deleted).

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#174

Post by asdff »

ExtraE wrote: post #91
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 just tried this (firefox on iOS, new england). Google asked for my location and I said “no”. TLDR: 2 ads, the rest organic. Top-2 were ads, a maps widget, organic result, people also ask, 4 organic results, people also search for, images, 4 organic, 1 ad.

Really? I just did this on desktop and the first two pages were all advertisements for florists. These sorts of links used to be demarked as ads on google search in the before times. Wikipedia didn't even appear until page three. That used to be the first result for a typical noun search.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#175

Post by slownews45 »

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…

No question that anti-trust is currently pretty much incoherent.

One frustration is that it has morphed from things around consumer harm to a new focus on harm to other ... businesses.

Google downranks some crappy content farm / shopping aggregator - bam - antitrust complaint. Yes, it hurt that business and so helps google shopping - but no one asks - do users like these crap content farms? Same with google finance - I liked it. Now google can't prioritize that - even through I want it and so I get sent to a giant ad laden garbage fest of another finance / stock quote site.

The other issue consumers no longer have any leverage with respect to very large businesses and govt is no where. So Apple can build a very valuable offering by playing "cop" in their closed garden. That is a consumer benefit.

In other words, you individually would never be able to negotiate a deal where someone would let you sign up for their service anonymously, but apple can force that.

They can force trials signups to have full details of renewals (same font).

They can force folks to allow you to cancel subscriptions without huge advance warnings and will remind you of subscriptions in advance. Yes, this sucks for developers, but the consumer is helped by these steps.

Until govt steps in, I'd love for them to back off on folks creating these places where the tons of crap the govt allows on the broader internet is not permitted.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#176

Post by cormacrelf »

lugged wrote: post #154
gugagore wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Las I checked judges don't love it when you try to be clever or cute.

Establishing the use of the word "market" in an email is not the end goal. The end goal is establishing the violation of US antitrust laws by, e.g. buying out the competition and taking actions that unreasonably restrict trade (generally in your competitors' goods/services).

But there are two ways to hold a company to account. One is a civil mechanism, producing civil penalties and consent decrees (or damages, maybe?). The other is by the prosecution of a criminal offence. Enforcement via the latter is harder to do. It requires showing the actions were done intentionally, just like every criminal prosecution. It also has a very high standard of proof. Using the word "crushing the competition" in the context of buying competitors or engineering them out of the first page of search results is evidence of that. Google doesn't want exposure to criminal liability. It is undoubtedly harder to prove they did this stuff intentionally if they deliberately refrain from talking about it and do it in winks and nods.

I don't know what you're referring to by "try to be clever or cute" but using these language guidelines to decode discovered materials and show a criminal intent to do things that constitute criminal violations of antitrust law is not cute, and neither is relying on the absence of directly incriminating language to absolve yourself.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#177

Post by slownews45 »

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.

The analysis here is so absolutist and extremist it is ridiculous.

Many business have auto-delete for the simple business purpose - when someone hacks your email (which will happen somewhere in a large business) - why do you need to keep all that crap around forever? And yes, people email payroll details, passwords, logins and the list goes on - stop with the preaching about how to email securely.

So you auto-delete, which reduces the blast radius. In most cases folks are not looking at emails past 3 years old.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#178

Post by ocdtrekkie »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #159
greatgib wrote: post #52

I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years ago. Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus phones. (I don't remember the exact details) And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation were published on internet a few days before the official announcement. Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a few years ago it was not yet the case.…

The reason Googlers get really ticked off about leaks is that they ruined the very candid and open internal culture we used to have. In the 10 years I've been there I've seen us go from TGIF sessions where Larry and Sergey and Eric openly discussed things that every other employer I'd had before would have kept quiet ... to the situation now which is a lot less like that. And it has a lot to do with leaks from those…

On the contrary, the leaker is sharing with the public, often things people deserve to know. It's the height of selfishness to be upset that Larry and Sergey stopped telling you about their dirty laundry, because the public was finding out.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#179

Post by rnhmjoj »

hlau wrote: post #123
dredmorbius wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I almost never get useful results out of a web search, nowadays, unless the query is very specific (like looking up a website I forgot the domain of). This is not particular to google search, which in fact I don't use anymore.

Trying to find information given only fuzzy details almost never produce relevant links; anything remotely commercial, like trying to find a product reviews, film to watch, a store nearby, etc. produces tons of synthetic websites full of ads that magically match my query; specific technical information can result in low-effort blogspam or total rip-offs from other websites (stackexchange answers, other blogs, etc.); and the list goes on.

It seems to me the only actually interesting material is now found in forums, message boards, wikis and other kind of websites where users generate the content. Unfortunately searching these is far from handy because they aren't always indexed or have archaic interfaces or require a login. I think search engines in general, either by prioritising revenue or being tricked by spammers and CEO, are now blind to the real information contained in the web. I wish for a search engine that would only index a curated list of genuine websites based on a topic, but I don't think we'll ever have one because it's not profitable.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#180

Post by twirlock »

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…

Way to explain exactly what the fucking article said.
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