Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#2On 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.
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#3It is far more widespread than an interaction with a Google employee. The phenomenon is everywhere. It was distilled perfectly by Upton Sinclair quite a while ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#4While I wholeheartedly agree with this article, I can't help but think, why would Google or Googlers encourage discussion about anti-trust in the first place? I understand that Google certainly does dominate the market, but can you really blame them for wanting to keep it that way?
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#5While I wholeheartedly agree with this article, I can't help but think, why would Google or Googlers encourage discussion about anti-trust in the first place? I understand that Google certainly does dominate the market, but can you really blame them for wanting to keep it that way?
probably because for a company that prides itself on innovation, it's a long term bad idea to prioritize eliminating wrong-think and hiring people who are okay with that over people who actually believe in competition and open thought
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#6There was a point in time when monopolies weren't understood as economic constructs.
We're in a new era where the Famgopolies are something entirely new with an even greater reach. They're all-encapsulating bubbles that ensnare people across all the interactions they perform on a daily basis, then tax every single point of ingress or egress.
If they keep growing, the classic Demolition Man scene where everything is Taco Bell will come true. Everything we see, buy, eat, date, or think will come from the Famgopolies.
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#7Forget 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".
"65% of searches don’t result in a click" is a feature. You asked a question, you got the answer to that question. A search engine isn't a tool to find sites, it's a tool to find information; once upon a time that meant finding a site for that information, but ideally, it means finding the information. Sometimes you might be looking for "a site that has X", but often you're just looking for X. For that matter, 100% of searches via Google Assistant don't result in a "click", because the information has to be digested and presented via a voice interface.
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.
So, yes, a regulator or competitor who speaks in terms of how Google isn't driving users to other sites or prioritizing its own sites, and doesn't acknowledge that doing so is answering the user's question, is indeed speaking a foreign language.
If we were in some post-scarcity world, someone trying to help user's find information should be taking a very similar approach to Google (or finding something even better), and finding more ways to make information more digestible and presentable this way, and encouraging sites to provide information in a way that can answer questions like this.
In today's non-post-scarcity world, there is absolutely an anti-competitive issue here. But the problem is that the most efficient and often most useful way to answer a user's question may well be incompatible with the "just present links to sites given search terms" model.
In seeking to solve that problem, we can't start out by preventing people from presenting information in whatever way users find most useful and efficient. We shouldn't seek to shoehorn a search engine back into a simple "here are the results for your search terms" model. Any approach that unthinkingly tries to foster competition by breaking the ability to present information in the most useful way possible is rightfully treated as some outside hostile force that's destroying something useful.
And because so much of the effort to regulate this as an anti-competitive issue has been unthinkingly treating a search engine as nothing more than mapping search terms to outbound site links, that has generated a backlash even outside of Google (for instance, here on HN), from people who see how much value would be destroyed by such an approach.
Not all efforts to foster competition have been this unthinking. I've seen proposals that try to introduce the use of APIs to present such information from a variety of sources (e.g. "here's the service I prefer to use for flights/hotels/etc"). I don't know if that's the right approach, or if it's fair, or if it's necessary, but it's at least closer to the right direction, and it isn't destroying useful things like "answering user's questions" or "building a useful voice assistant".
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#8This 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 things via video chat, but it’s not about limiting thought.
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#9The author could use another search engine, or put their business efforts(SEO) into a field not dependent on another company(Google) making zero changes to their services. They aren't the power company(or another utility), they are a for-profit corporation, behaving in a manner the shareholders of a for-profit corporation expect them to.
Or is that...unreasonable?
Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
#10While I wholeheartedly agree with this article, I can't help but think, why would Google or Googlers encourage discussion about anti-trust in the first place? I understand that Google certainly does dominate the market, but can you really blame them for wanting to keep it that way?
Google wants to be anthropomorphized. It is a non-physical but conscious/living entity, and yeah I do empathize with its desire to continue to exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore