Live data from Hacker News

Response to Google open letter

accc.gov.au

231–240 of 330 posts

Re: Response to Google open letter

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ABC is government funded: https://www.abc.net.au/ And SBS is partially government funded: https://www.sbs.com.au But it's not enough to have just two news organisations.

If the number of organizations is the concern, the government could fund a larger number of organizations. This doesn't seem fatal to the option I proposed.

Or the government could just make Google pay for what it uses. It's simpler and more direct.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#232

For the health of society, all recommender algorithms have to be daylighted. For a start. Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important? Every other efficient open market is heavily regulated. Accountability, transparency, fair play, information symmetry, prohibit self-dealing & conflicts of interest, tort, etc. Right now we can't even imagine appl…

You can't just open source the algorithms - you also have to release the data and the platform on which the algorithm was executed. This is becoming a major problem because a lot of research papers publish their results and their methodology but not the data so it's not reproducible. A LOT of the data Google would have would be semi-private. It's generally OK if Google has it because (arguably) the user shared the da…

Rhetorical: Why does Google have PII?

Advertising, engagement.

I'm ok with banning, sharply curtailing targeted advertising.

If personalized search results get impaired, darn. I'd much prefer to curate my own filter bubble any way.

Newsfeeds and other algorithmic outrage maximizers should be banned outright.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they might just have to pay for it. "If we had to pay more for news content, we would probably just cut it out because we don't want to pay - thus leading to worse results" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it :-) The amount they'd have to pay for it seems to be dramatically more than what they make for it, so "if this law passes, we will stop serving these results" seems to be a reasonable reaction.

> "if this law passes, we will stop serving these results" seems to be a reasonable reaction. If that's Google's reaction then they should say so outright, not this weasel wordy letter.

Being required to inform news media about changes to result ranking algorithms in advance and advise them on how to avoid being impacted also gives news media a unique ability to game search results and takes away Google’s ability to prevent them from gaming results. I would certainly expect this to also seriously degrade the quality of search results. Not only will results become a pile of worthless SEO spam by news companies, Google will also have to use a much more simple ranking algorithm free of both ML techniques that can’t be explained to news companies and advanced algorithm techniques that are valuable trade secrets that news companies would obviously leak with their many employees, poor security, and adversarial motives.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#234
post #120
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The google letter makes non-existent claims that aren't part of the proposed law. Like that youtube and google will somehow magically offer worse results. They can offer the exact same results they do now - they might just have to pay for it. "If we had to pay more for news content, we would probably just cut it out because we don't want to pay - thus leading to worse results" doesn't quite have the same ring, does i…

The "worse results" probably stem from the part of the law about changes in pagerank algorithms: If search engines are required to notify about changes in algorithm and provide mitigations for those changes, the easiest way to provide this would be: Keep the algorithm as it is, never change it again (for Australia) and accept the degradation that will result from that.

Also, what does this section even mean in the context of ML models? How do you communicate that you trained an interest-estimation model on more data and will now be using the upgraded version? I’m sure Google uses many such models for producing personalized results, and probably several are updated in production every day. Does Google have to share the inner workings of their search stack with these news companies? Do they have to share the models? Does Google have to explain to these news companies how the newly trained model might treat their content differently than the previous iteration? Any of these things I expect would cause Google to throw up their hands and abandon the country. Exposing a live feed of all their trade secrets to the employees of random news companies is obviously not going to happen, and explaining why ML models do what they do is an active research area.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From google’s open letter > Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses. That seems to pretty clearly suggest Google will be forced to hand over personal data.

It's deceptive. They aren't saying they would hand over any data.

That seems to be pretty clearly what the law says they will have to do. Do you have a different interpretation?

Re: Response to Google open letter

#236
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ACCC can ultimately make Google do what it wants and is backed by a government on this matter Not really. Google could just exit Australia. And who you think that would hurt more, Australia or Google?

As long as the proposed regulations don't make Google's Australian operations completely unprofitable, they won't.

Based on the last time this was up on HN I recall the news company lobby estimated that Google would be required to pay something like $1B/year, which is certainly far more money than they make off of news-related searches originating in Australia. The law has some prohibitions on Google substituting Australian news with news from sources in other countries, but I think it doesn’t go so far as to say that Google has to continue to serve news searches. Abandoning the country entirely might be a stretch, given how many other products would be impacted, but disabling news results entirely or declining searches that seem to be looking for news would not be surprising. The law is clearly deliberately vague to give both the government and the news companies the upper hand against Google in any sort of legal dispute, but I think Google would be within its rights to take this to court and demand an enumerated list of all of the news companies in Australia (since the law says the government is planning to make a list) and a list of all of the international sources of news that Google is prohibited from substituting, then stop serving results from either in Australia.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#237
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought was that Google would do as per Spain and just stop linking Australian news outlets. However, I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites - and pay. Or else carry nothing at all.

> I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news? Maybe they should just string match all their news results to Australian news so nothing gets through, even if they appear on third…

> Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?

Because the law says so, because the law is very deliberately crafted as a mechanism to force Google to give money to Australian news companies.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google gets content and advertising revenue, journalists are not getting enough return for their work. It's not sustainable.

I don't think Google News displays ads on result pages, just the title + thumbnail. Why should they pay for displaying these links when they don't earn anything on them, it doesn't make business sense. As for news discovered by regular search, I think that is different because the user has to input specific search keywords and restrict to recent results. The difference is about intention and recurring visits. The sit…

> it doesn't make business sense

If it didn't make business sense then Google wouldn't be showing them in the first place. It plainly does make business sense. Google shouldn't be afraid to pay for what it uses.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#239
post #221

For the health of society, all recommender algorithms have to be daylighted. For a start. Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important? Every other efficient open market is heavily regulated. Accountability, transparency, fair play, information symmetry, prohibit self-dealing & conflicts of interest, tort, etc. Right now we can't even imagine appl…

2 reasons. 1. the quality of the recommendations is the real competitive advantage. It's like saying that all the sports scouting agencies need to fully reveal their algorithm to finding top talent to ensure fairness, when that exact algorithm is the thing that makes them a top scouting agency. 2. The company itself doesn't really know how the recommender works.(source: I built explainable ML models for a living). Th…

It's great that you're conscientious, seriously working on ML, big data, adjacent policy issues. Thank you.

In the spirit of "yes, and...":

Can't manage what we can't (or won't measure. So policy wise, we should not delegate judgement, and default to hippocratic until we know more.

ML & big data is following the fad cycle, just like optimization, expert systems, etc. I'm 95% certain that >95% ML and big data is hooey, most value has been realized, the rest is imagined.

But meanwhile, these foolsgold pathogens are wreaking the economy. Or worse.

Re: Response to Google open letter

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could future results be any worse?

I actually don't see how "gamification" (adversarial websites exploiting loopholes in ranking) can even result in making ad revenue lower excepting the scenario where it makes Search itself less useful and therefore less used overall?

IDK. My prediction: Ad revenue peaked. COVID-19 is accelerating the decline. Google and others switched strategies to engagement and "rundles".
Post reply on HN