Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

zyppy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 309 posts

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#201

Post by richardfey »

slownews45 wrote: post #175
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…

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 -…

> Now google can't prioritize that - even through I want it

Of course they can: they could let you opt-in to this specific facet of customised search results. The general issue is about the default search results.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#202

Post by CryptoPunk »

This sort of reminds me of how the public sector establishment limits the acceptable language around cultural flashpoints, like gender identity.

I was told that using the term "biological female" was transphobic in the context of gender identity, and the individual in question was pressing the issue to the point where I thought there was a reasonable possibility I would be banned from the forum if I persisted. I was told I have to use cis-female. But that not only limits the expressive efficacy of my statement, by substituting a well known term with one that a significant fraction of the population does not know, it also, under the guise of fighting diminution of the marginalized, narrows the concept of a biological female, with the end goal clearly to be to effect a change in the definition of "female" itself.

We see this same kind of language narrowing in the corporate world, with Google's rules on how to discuss issues relevant to monopoly, but I suspect this is defensive, and motivated by the legal threat of anti-trust action, as such language used by employees can directly impact the outcome of an anti-trust trial.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#203

Post by roenxi »

kmeisthax wrote: post #200
roenxi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helpfully this is exactly the sort of argument I'm complaining about. The basic form is "the regulators did this", its "hard to show concrete harm" but therefore "we should go after any company that is dominant in any market". If we skip to the handwave, what is and how solid is the evidence that the regulator's actions were sensible? Targeting the most competent company for harassment is, on the face of it, a bad st…

The problem with this is that I can't really point to a competition-stifling regulation that actually benefits Google. Copyright and patent law would be the closest thing, but Google's core business isn't selling licensing agreements. They owned the search market way before Android was even a public project, much less the open-core monstrosity it is today. Google got to where it is because it legitimately hunted the…

Can you point to actual harm done by Google that people can't walk away from?

I've been working to untangle myself from them for a while. It isn't particularly hard, there are just a lot of really good services that need to be replaced.

The only thing I can't evade is the constant snooping all over the web. And that isn't something antitrust regulators are going to be dealing with.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#204

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rossjudson wrote: post #198
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like you're comfortable with having all of your conversations transcribed directly to twitter! Let us know where we can read that.

I think that is an extremely false equivalence. While there's an inherent irony about Sergey and Larry's woeful desire for privacy, whilst buying yachts bought by stripping everyone else of their own... I think it's fair to say that a public company affecting the lives of billions has drastically less right to privacy than a private individual. ;)

I'll leave you with a quote: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman.

The fact that Google locked down communication in response to the leaks, is a tacit confirmation that they are doing things they probably shouldn't be doing in the first place.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#205

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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.

q: why do you ask people to use the word area instead of market?

a: Because imprecise language clouds thinking and makes things less intelligible, and Google is a company that makes its money from intelligence. People have been incorrectly referring to areas as markets, in order to better communicate we laid down guidelines. We often lay down guidelines about corporate communications to heighten their efficiency, as do other companies

on edit: I'm not saying that this is true, but one can easily make an argument as to why you use area instead of market in communication and ask your workers to do likewise. I would think the courts would require more evidence than that.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#206

Post by rprwhite »

sidlls wrote: post #135
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…

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

That's true, but if this didn't make news then what would've happened in the future? Thousands, millions maybe, of documents talking about areas and no mention of markets make discover more difficult for a future anti-trust case.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#207

Post by equality_1138 »

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…

Healthier way? This is wrong. First, to admit your goal is to crush your competitors is completely appropriate. That is the exact way the market is supposed to work. Thoughts about hiding this inherent part of any businesses strategy is, well, fine for lawyers, but essentially ignorant for engineers. Lawyers are not paid to make things, nor to develop your strategy. They are paid to manipulate laws and the truth. To write ethical issues off as lawyers just lawyering is a terrible way to approach business or technology.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#208

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#209

Post by jewelry »

A lot of discussion of 1984 here in US. The truth is most of the people here have no idea of what 1984 looks like, unless they've lived in China for more than 5 years. That's the combination of money, power and brain power to lock the intelligence and wash the brains.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#210

Post by B-Con »

deathanatos wrote: post #184

This is such an uncharitable interpretation of the training materials. The material there is not saying "if you want to speak about things that raise antitrust concerns, use this coded language", it's saying "don't do these things, and just focus on building a good product". Like, the thing here that really boggles my mind: if the training materials had said literally the exact opposite of what they do: "crush the co…

Every now and then I'm reminded of a) how much of HN has never worked for a large company, and b) how unfamiliar much of HN is with common business and legal practices.

Too many thought leaders masquerading as engineers.

Post reply on HN