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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#41

Post by mavhc »

johan_felisaz wrote: post #14
hospadar wrote: post #2

On a literary note: another great sci-fi reference point is Samuel Delaney's "Babel 17" - the hook is that a government creates a language that enables extreme thought capabilities, but prevents you from conceptualizing the opposing government as anything but an enemy.

Totally out of topic, but I highly recommend it ... (Not technically a spoiler) I really liked the parallel betweens the bad guys' language, which was manipulative to the extreme, and the good guys' language, which was of course less extreme but still contained deceiving vocabulary (i.e. Babel 17 is critiqued because the good guys are called "who are invading", yet the bad guys are themselves called "invaders" in Eng…

People who go to live in other countries are called expats, people coming to live in your country are called immigrants

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#42

Post by poof131 »

It amazes me that the consumer welfare standard has become so ingrained in legal antitrust. How is a company town, feudalism, or even slavery not the purest endgame of this logic? Own nothing and forever be indebted. “Wow, everything is free for most consumers, I guess we created a great world!” Can we move on to the total welfare standard, please. [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#43

Post by thegrimmest »

terafo wrote: post #30
JoshTriplett wrote: post #7

Forget about "competition" and "who provides the service" for just a moment. (I'll return to them below.) I'm saying all of this as someone who doesn't use Google search . I would like to see more competition in search engines. But anyone seeking to work in that space needs to think about how users actually use search engines, and stop thinking in the conceptual model of "finding sites for the given search terms". "6…

It's accurate to say that Google is in competition with every site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business of providing information to users needs to treat Google as their competitor. I think the problem that author tries to address is that Google uses their competitor's data in order to serve that information, which isn't that great since IIRC they do no profit sharing which undermines long term v…

> Google uses their competitor's data

Their competitor's publicly available and explicitly indexable data. Their competitors are free to ban Google from crawling their site.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#44

Post by skybrian »

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…

I understand what you’re getting at and there is certainly a lot of closed-mindedness going around. I don’t think any organization is immune to this.

But there are also a lot of employees who have strongly opposed various Google policies and engaged in various political activity based on that, so the groupthink doesn’t seem to be working very well? Also, the company leaks like a sieve these days.

Even before that, there were a lot of internal debates. (They just didn’t leak as much.) It’s in part because of these debates that you need policies; people sometimes say careless things in heated discussions.

(Former Googler, but it’s been a while.)

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#45

Post by shadowgovt »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #17
sa1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not be intended to limit thought, just to avoid liability, but does it limit thought anyway?

Well, I'd say it does. My understanding is that if you're not limited in what you're thinking, but severely limited in how you are allowed to think about it, your freedom of thought is limited nonetheless. And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours, lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable name and there won't be any lawyering…

How people think about things and what people put in legally discoverable media like email are worlds apart. As a basic aspect of corporate survival, it's important to keep that in mind.

The overarching concept is "don't make it hard for the company to do business." The point of those trainings is that the words to avoid have legally-defined meanings that may or may not be what the Googler intended, but are likely to be interpreted in an antitrust sense in a court of law. The underlying concept is "don't talk like a lawyer if you're not one of our lawyers."

Watching what you put in email (as described in this article) is in the same training where Googlers are given the overarching advice "always communicate via email as if those emails are going to show up on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow."

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#46

Post by AlbertCory »

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 ads and they are not colored anymore (although they do say "Ad"). There is also a Maps snippet which shows where I can buy flowers.

What happened? Well, I can guess: they did experiments, and not coloring the ads produced more revenue. I know from talking to ordinary users that they often say proudly "I never click on ads!" Now they do.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#47

Post by ohazi »

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…

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's time to step back and reevaluate the ethics of what this company stands for."

A company is a machine that is going to do whatever it can to print money, including brainwashing its employees. You and your colleagues are the only entities capable of ethical reasoning. The company and its executive functionaries are not going to do this for you. In fact, they're more likely going to try and stop you.

It's your responsibility to do it anyway.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#48

Post by shadowgovt »

ohazi wrote: post #47
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…

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 table (because that communication is not in discoverable media).

But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable performance tuning.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#50

Post by shadowgovt »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #35
JoshTriplett wrote: post #7

Forget about "competition" and "who provides the service" for just a moment. (I'll return to them below.) I'm saying all of this as someone who doesn't use Google search . I would like to see more competition in search engines. But anyone seeking to work in that space needs to think about how users actually use search engines, and stop thinking in the conceptual model of "finding sites for the given search terms". "6…

I read a certain amount of entitlement in TFA too. Like "I deserve to have my site on the front page of Google, rather than its paid advertisers or its own pages". Why? This isn't a government-provided public service. It's a commercial product. Why should they direct traffic to your site for free? They, like everyone else, walk the line between providing an excellent product for customers and creating revenue for sha…

The entitlement may be sourced to the fact that the author is an SEO company.

As a sidebar... SEO companies would love to see Google knocked out of its current market position. Google has gotten very good at relying on signal that SEO companies can't control. They would much prefer a more gamable engine take Google's position from it.

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