Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

by cyrusshepard • 5 years ago

954 290 5 years ago

hospadar• 5 years ago

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.

johan_felisaz• 5 years ago

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 English ...)

mavhc• 5 years ago

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

snarf21• 5 years ago

It 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!”

prox• 5 years ago

Same with asking people here to stop using Chrome to get rid of the way it dominates the web.

When you are tied to the hip to something, you will never change. The network effect keeps you on the same Ferris wheel.

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

It is far more widespread than an interaction with a Google employee.

Yes, it's systemic, not just in capitalism, through all of nature.

In cell biology, it's the Krebs cycle.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28219702/

SCUSKU• 5 years ago

While 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?

Barrin92• 5 years ago

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

Lammy• 5 years ago

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

echelon• 5 years ago

There 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.

shadowgovt5• 5 years ago

You really need to define 'famgolopy' every time you use it. It's not in urbandictionary and the only search results on the topic link back to these threads.

It's too much of a neologism to trust that people understand what you mean from context.

JoshTriplett• 5 years ago

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".

"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".

terafo• 5 years ago

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 viability of collecting, systemising and maintaining that data.

thegrimmest• 5 years ago

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.

marcus_holmes3• 5 years ago

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 shareholders.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Google since they stopped not being evil. But I'm not sure that having a competing set of search engines would solve the author's problem - they would be writing passionate blog posts about "why can't we have a single set of SEO rules so I can get my site to the front page of all of them with no hassle?"

shadowgovt5• 5 years ago

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.

handoflixue• 5 years ago

Worth noting that many times, the complaint is that the query is answered by an infobox... and the info in that box is provided by a website... and that website is the one complaining about a lack of clicks, because now people just use Google's scraped answers instead of actually visiting the site.

It seems valid to complain that Google is profiting off of a site while simultaneously harming that site's visibility.

leepowers• 5 years ago

I've always been fascinated by people who spend huge chunks of time creating and maintaining Wikipedia articles. Are they driven by a simple love research and curating information? Or maybe knowing their articles could potentially inform and educate millions of people.

I wonder how driven content creators would be if they believed no one would read their articles; if the information they carefully curated was mere bot food, digested and summarized on a Google search results page. The summaries may have greater utility for search engine users. Yet at the same time the ecosystem as a whole would be degraded if the incentives for creating rich detailed content are degraded.

Google relies on free and open access to a vast sea of information. Most of this information exists due to the labor of other people. If any company wants to use this information to create a free and open source search engine, voice assistant, etc., I say more power to that company. But when a company uses free and open data to power proprietary walled gardens, we should consider the regulatory implications and the effect on the ecosystem as a whole. And Google is large enough that when it creates a walled garden (keeping visitors tied Google properties and products) that it could have a significant negative impact.

skybrian3• 5 years ago

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 things via video chat, but it’s not about limiting thought.

sa1• 5 years ago

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

skybrian3• 5 years ago

It might have some effect, but Googlers can read all the same stuff on the Internet as everyone else.

WesolyKubeczek4• 5 years ago

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 around this.

Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing cult!

I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators to not even think about what they do as "torture", but "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace.

refenestrator2• 5 years ago

Working there in the first place limits thought. Nobody wants to think of themselves as part of the problem.

The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a little easier.

Johnie• 5 years ago

Many large companies have the same policies/training for this very reason. You do not want to put something in writing that could potentially appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

The training/policies just codify that.

titzer5• 5 years ago

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.

minsc__and__boo• 5 years ago

That's not just Google though. Most companies have an email deletion policy that auto-deletes emails after a certain about of time, on the premise that they eventually lose all value and only pose a potential liability and litigation risk.

Even U.S. government officials have used private email servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests.

ChrisLomont• 5 years ago

There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.

You already completely answered the perfectly standard and reasonable business reason: "to limit legal exposure. "

In fact, this legitimate business reason is 100% the reason for the policy. Increasing legal exposure for no reason is a bad idea, for companies and for individuals.

gumby2• 5 years ago

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months

Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours.

laurent922• 5 years ago

The email policy has no other purpose

Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled way according to GDPR.

But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google, since they don’t do support ;)

pixl97• 5 years ago

I disagree. If its part of the institutional memory it should be documented on an internal site and kept. Not stuck in an email format to disappear.

yongjik• 5 years ago

The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure.
There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.

So the policy is about limiting the chance of potentially very expensive lawsuits, and has no legitimate business reason? Choose one.

I wish people stopped overusing "Orwellian": the term is so overused that you could use it next to "agile" and I wouldn't notice.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 5 years ago

You get more of the behaviors you encourage and less of the ones you discourage. The US legal system strongly discourages retaining email, since it rarely works in favor of the entity making the retention decision. And there is no particular reason to keep emails that old, so naturally companies want to get rid of them.

m0zg• 5 years ago

So that's what they settled on? Kent tried to introduce it while I was still there and the pushback was so severe they decided not to do it at the time. I think the initially proposed retention period was shorter than that though. I could live with 18 months, but shorter than that cuts into all sorts of business processes including the all-important performance review cycle (AKA "perf"). I do think it's detrimental to the business of writing software though. I quite often search for emails from years and years ago, as well as mail "notes to self" to be able to find them later.

cornel_io• 5 years ago

Almost every US corporation with a competent legal department has such a policy, and at a lot of them the period is way shorter than 18 months. I've suffered through 30 day policies before, and it's dumb and not fun at all, but Google is hardly being creative on this point.

slownews455• 5 years ago

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.

_Algernon_• 5 years ago

How is it Orwellian?

"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson"—a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Stop overusing terms you don't understand

daxelrod• 5 years ago

This is a pretty standard policy at larger companies. Part of the reason is that even if everything in the emails is 100% legally fine, discovery is _expensive_ and gets more expensive the more emails exist.

This explanation was given to me by a corporate lawyer who was trying to figure out whether the same kind of expiration could be put on tickets in bug and project trackers, which would have been even more harmful to institutional memory than an email expiration policy.

zepto• 5 years ago

Why not both?

ohazi2• 5 years ago

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.

shadowgovt5• 5 years ago

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.

CPLX2• 5 years ago

This is what’s known as a Stringer Bell warning[0] and it doesn’t reflect well on the organization who has to make it this aggressively.

Yes, it stands to reason that if you’re engaged in a potentially unlawful conspiracy you need to be careful what you put in writing.

However if this is coming up constantly and prevents you from using common sense words for your regular business operations then it’s a pretty clear red flag that your actions may be subjecting you to legal liability.

[0] https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8

pyrale• 5 years ago

From don't be evil to don't leave a paper trail...

eawoifjaiowepfj• 5 years ago

discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context

I don't work for Google or have much of an opinion on "Googlespeak".

However, that the practice of law is allowed to exist in its current state is an indictment on our society. The legal profession is one that polices itself, has no proper oversight (judges are just lawyers with a more refined superiority complex), raises barriers to entry with a level of zeal only matched by medicine (to which it is not actually comparable), and is also allowed to maliciously and limitlessly wield this power over the people who do real work is a foundational problem with governmental design.

_nalply3• 5 years ago

A hard-of-hearing friend of mine got tired listening to videos. He told me that he sneakily ran speech-to-text software and read the text in a separate window.

In a different vein, when I was younger I didn't understand why people preferred phoning.

I as a Deaf engineer rely on written communication. This exposes myself and people communicating with me to «showing what has been said». I am sure that in my career I missed some important information just because people weren't willing to create a persistent record of communication.

My friend «solved» this problem, but I am sure his interlocutors would be miffed if they knew that.

clipradiowallet• 5 years ago

The 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?

kwhitefoot• 5 years ago

Or is that...unreasonable

Yes. And I suppose that is what your downvoters mean too.

mcrad• 5 years ago

Okay so do shareholders of public companies encourage the management to commit fraud and deception?

coldacid• 5 years ago

What good would "[putting] their business efforts" towards other companies accomplish, other than cutting off their own air supply? With how much of search is dominated by Google, you have to deal with them if your job is SEO, simply because all of their search competitors combined don't add up to the Big G.

ryankupyn• 5 years ago

I think that a lot of this makes sense from Google's legal perspective, where antitrust litigation is a constant consideration and any internal document mentioning market share or competitors could be used against them.

I'm sure that there is a great deal of discussion about potential anticompetitive issues within Google and with their outside counsel, but in a context where legal privilege protects against disclosure.

WesolyKubeczek4• 5 years ago

One could argue that they position themselves as an accomplished monopoly already, because their internal correspondence pretends competition doesn't even exist, or is of no consequence whatsoever.

coinomega• 5 years ago

Being a monopoly (or to be precise: to be in a dominant position), is not problematic in EU competition law. It is the abuse of said position that is illegal!

https://ec.europa.eu/competition/publications/factsheets/ant...

nixpulvis• 5 years ago

If Google would like to return the public investments in the creation of The Web perhaps then and only then should we allow them to destroy it.

ec109685• 5 years ago

It’s difficult to imagine any new flight search, no matter how innovative, winning today with Google acting as the web’s gatekeeper.

Google results are dominated by the Expedia Group (a conglomerate of tons of different brands: https://www.expediagroup.com/home/default.aspx). While Google's practices have definitely hurt, it's a huge business, and probably a larger reason why a new flight search competitor can't get off the ground.

As a customer, it's annoying there isn't more diversity anymore. Generic travel searches are dominated by these brands, plus articles full of affiliate links that are hard to trust.

dleslie2• 5 years ago

While looking at the tables of good versus bad phrasing I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading something not so dissimilar to how leaders of organized crime historically avoided prosecution. By not naming the crime, by speaking about it indirectly and with softer language, they hoped to invigorate doubt in a hypothetical jury.

It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry II, who stated off-hand "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

JadeNB• 5 years ago

Or the earlier example "Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sen...).

roenxi5• 5 years ago

Yeah, but that isn't even a hint of a problem. It would be like observing that Google and the mafia also both use accounting principles to organise their finances.

These large companies are going to be involved in lawsuits, no matter what. Their written communications are going to be trawled through, more than likely. Everyone in the company would have to be a bit simple for there not to be some preparations to defend against legal discovery.

Even if you believe yourself to be completely innocent of any crime, it is still stupid to make life easier for some legal assailant.

dleslie2• 5 years ago

If the behaviour doesn't warrant prosecution then there would be no need for careful use of language to conceal it.

eunoia2• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wonder how much of the push against remote work from certain large companies comes down to the increased discoverability (in the legal sense) of employee communications over Slack/Teams/etc vs in person...

eunoia2• 5 years ago

Can't edit anymore, so replying. Can anyone tell me why this is apparently not a concern? Genuinely curious especially in light of this article.

Nebasuke• 5 years ago

Google normally deletes all chat history for its employees using chat in 24 hours, or if you use "save" history then it's 30 days.

tytso• 5 years ago

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 going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.

delusional• 5 years ago

I agree that others do the same, but the observation that vocabulary somewhat affects thought is still interesting. As an example, the sentence about "defensive rationale" didn't just reformulate the sentence, it completely changed the meaning.

If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition" they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it they also can't recognize it when it happens.

dannyw• 5 years ago

Trust me, every Google exec thinks hard about crushing competition. They just don't put it in writing.

judge20203• 5 years ago

The policy isn't to avoid crushing competition or becoming a monopoly in some market, it's to avoid specifically setting out to do so. Unless Google intentionally slows development/cuts resources, the amount of capital and level of talent they put into products makes "make the product better for users" a plan very likely to result in naturally taking over the market.

ajb• 5 years ago

Yes and no.

Via market share, competition amplifies the rewards of being better. if you make your product 1% better than the competition, you might go from 30% to 70% market share. But to do so, you have to actually gain the market share. You can't just "build it and they will come"; in many industries, someone has to go out and win the market after the product is built. And so a lot of people in companies are really, really, really, motivated to gain market share. That's what increases their share option value, and gets their bonuses. And that's what tempts companies towards lock-in and all the rest.

yakubin• 5 years ago

Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers.

The lawn mower would like to have a word with you: <https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040>

georgeecollins• 5 years ago

That is an amazing talk! Thank you for sharing.

CrazyCatDog• 5 years ago

Reference is not until about the 38:30 mark, link starts sooner but provides greatly amplifying context!

smhost6• 5 years ago

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?

simcop2387• 5 years ago

The logic is that this isn't a sign of google being a monopoly and that it has more implications than just being there to avoid anti-trust actions.

regnull• 5 years ago

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.

zeteo• 5 years ago

Public relations has been around for a hundred years now. It shouldn't be news to anyone that large companies are careful with phrasing things and have full time employees devoted to the nuances of messaging.

And yes, when armies of lawyers are routinely descending on your internal communications then it sucks but PR-speak has to become the norm for all. Most people don't like it, but the consequences of not doing it are even worse.

grecy• 5 years ago

Which is hilarious, because I remember very clearly when McDonald's was crushing Burger King and the head of McDonald's said, on the record, "You know what you do when your competitors are drowning. ... step on their head".

I guess burger joints can't be monopolies.

fennecfoxen• 5 years ago

Burger joints compete in the "fast food" market which also includes fried chicken joints, taco joints, and the like. They also have more broad competition from the "fast casual" market, "restaurant dining" market, and the "food" market.

The question antitrust has historically asked here is the concentration, and the extent to which have they have pricing power.

Frost1x• 5 years ago

But do the means justify the ends? Most people understand that unethical behavior or concerning actions to get a desired 'good' result isn't acceptable.

But the current approach is to mask the ends, the end goal may actually not be what we desire, e.g. corrupt monopolies leeching off society. But as long as we create approaches and incentive structures that get us to the same ends that are deemed acceptable, then it's just an "undesired side effect" we can handwave away, or so many managing businesses think.

Both the ends and the means matter.

bogwog• 5 years ago

At what point does *market share* not become a KPI? At what point does market share become so irrelevant, that you stop tracking it altogether in your entire multibillion-dollar megacorp, and make your employees stop talking about it?

Answer: When you become a monopoly (or are on your way there), and need to hide from regulators. That's the point where the market becomes irrelevant, so tracking market share is nothing more than a liability.

The "improve life for customers" stuff is all fluff that you might read in a training manual alongside photos of happy employees playing ping pong at work.

phkahler• 5 years ago

> The "improve life for customers" stuff is all fluff that you might read in a training manual alongside photos of happy employees playing ping pong at work.

I'd say Google is redefining the word "customers". What they really mean is users. Customers are traditionally those who pay for products or services. I'm sure Google also makes things easy for those who pay them, but that's not who they mean by "customers".

If I'm not mistaken the GoogleSpeak word for "companies we extort money from to maintain relevance in search results" is probably "partners".

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

if you create a product thats unique or defines a category you start by having a market share of 100 percent. Market share does not define monopolies. What defines monopolies is the absence of alternatives. Like you know, the postal service to send letters. funnily nobody talks about those.

jollybean7• 5 years ago

'Legal's job is much more about language than approach.

They will require you not to say 'crush competitors' because it would be used as evidence.

The issue 'make a better product vs. crush competitors' is usually a more of a strategic issue.

Edit: it's not illegal to want to 'crush competitors' FYI the issue is the language that would point in a particular direction. The evidence of my point is Google's existence - I would argue it participates in a number of anti-competitive practices for which it's very smart legal team has made sure the language they use doesn't support legal scrutiny.

kens2• 5 years ago

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 of course IBM and other at-risk companies will have training to keep people from writing things that will cause antitrust problems. (Their antitrust case had 30 million pages of discovery.)

Second, antitrust cases hinge on the "market" (as a legal term), so it's not surprising that Google wants employees to avoid using that word. In an antitrust case, each side will argue over what is "the market", and you don't want to lose the case because of a random email discussing the "market". Google's recommendation to say "Area" instead of "Market" hardly limits thought, but it makes a big different in antitrust.

Third, I don't want to go all CLS, but antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical. Even after the antitrust case against IBM ended (by fizzling out after 13 years), nobody agrees on whether IBM was violating antitrust laws or not.

sidlls3• 5 years ago

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

roenxi5• 5 years ago

antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical

Most things antitrust are incoherent and illogical. The unofficial plan seems to be literally to find market leaders who are offering substantially better products than the competition and then attack them for unspecified and likely immeasurable gains. Whether or not we've seen benefits from past antitrust actions, I don't believe measurements and observations of the actual outcomes are part of the debate. There is just an assumption that because they happened and big companies are bad ergo the outcome must have been good.

The article alludes to Google's 92% search engine market share as some sort of concealed monopoly. As a problem, this doesn't make sense! There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone switching to another search engine except the other search engines aren't generally very good. Google is better at providing search results than they are. Or presumably it is, I don't know since I stopped using Google Search a long while ago. This is a monopoly only in the sense that everyone agrees Google is a better option.

The problem with Google is that it is likely integrated with the US intelligence services. No antitrust suit is ever going to attack that; because it is the part that the government supports.

srswtf1233• 5 years ago

Okay, but we can agree that IBM powered the holocaust, and that those tattoos on survivor’s arms represented the punch cards for IBM systems, right?

Because really, when there’s a profit to be made, American companies are there to fill a “need”, right?

slownews455• 5 years ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 years ago

Here's Adam Curtis' brief history of Google's relationship to "the customer" (false label: advertisers are the customers, not search engine users)

1998 Idealism. "I think I want to make the world a better place."

https://youtu.be/55jSx4pRZqI?t=1789s

2000 Disaster and desperation. VCs tell SB what Google must do.

https://youtu.be/55jSx4pRZqI?t=2249s

jollybean7• 5 years ago

Neither having a child out of wedlock or even with someone on staff, and, quoting Conan the Barbarian have anything to do with anything really.

Sergei Brin pushed the company to invest in his wife's company, had an affair with a subordinate, and probably quotes some other funny things along the way, it might say 'something' but I'm not sure if it speaks to 'competence'.

I'm not sure if this attack on the character of the companies, while maybe somewhat relevant, really speaks to the 'legal posture' of the companies.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 years ago

"The only thing in my head is a conviction that our fascination with modern technology and the internet may go very quickly. It doesn't mean the internet will disappear - but it will just become suddenly seen as mundane. And not threatening. And quite a lot of it a bit of a con." - Adam Curtis

equality_1138• 5 years ago

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.

vasco• 5 years ago

You can win a 100 meter race by having a goal of running sub 8 seconds, or you can win a race by having a goal of crushing the other athletes. It's up to you if during your training you're focused on the times versus on the other athletes. It's also up to you if during the race you're looking left and right to see how fast they're running or if you're just focused on going the fastest you can. I think this is the difference in approach that they were mentioning. Obviously you still defeat the competition as a byproduct of being the fastest, but they are very different approaches.

throwaway201025• 5 years ago

Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women."

I don't think that's true. I work for Samsung and we talk about market share and competitors all the time.

I mean, why shouldn't we? Being crystal clear is a very good step to achieve a goal. We need to be more honest.

2hatredboned• 5 years ago

Somehow related Comic: > //s20.directupload.net/images/210825/v4dbak6h.png ^^

BTW: (Yesterday-News) "News For South African Looters As Samsung Moves To Block Stolen TVs..."

account42• 5 years ago

In other news: Googler doesn't see anything wrong with Google.

bigcorp-slave• 5 years ago

Every large company has these trainings. I personally have worked at multiple companies with very similar trainings.

With thousands of employees, a company can’t take the risk that some random college hire mouths off over Slack on something they don’t know anything about and it shows up in discovery for something in the future and is used as evidence of planned malfeasance on the part of the company. I know we don’t like Google but this is not a Google thing, it’s a “opposing lawyers will take speculation from random low level engineers wildly out of context and judges and juries are too dumb to put it in context” thing.

poof131• 5 years ago

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...

amelius3• 5 years ago

That font ...

bqmjjx0kac• 5 years ago

Times New Roman?

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

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.

azalemeth• 5 years ago

And, simultaneously, I've switched search engines to DDG (something I last did in the mid 1990s -- to Google!), and have multilayered network, browser, and hosts-file level adblocking. Such is the price of progress...

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

DDG is pretty good and it's my first try for searching.

Occasionally Google is still better. Just today, I was looking for old financial data on Synoptics (late 80s). Google has books & journals from back then; DDG does not.

ExtraE• 5 years ago

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.

asdff• 5 years ago

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.

dredmorbius3• 5 years ago

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 most especially.

But the bloom hasn't been anywhere near that rose for a long, long, long, long time.

hlau• 5 years ago

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.

caust1c• 5 years ago

Holy shit. No wonder google doesn't give a shit about adblockers. Those people would be the ones who care about litigation and stopping this shit. Easy to let such a small % of users slide when the other 99% will willingly fall into the ad trap.

This is insane:

https://i.imgur.com/bdtvyXF.png

helen___keller• 5 years ago

Wow, I had no idea because it's been so long since I've been without ad blockers.

Interestingly, I tried the same on DuckDuckGo and it seemed almost identical: some inlined ads, shopping results, have to scroll down to find actual search results. (main difference: embedded non-ad results like wikipedia and news).

AlbertCory3• 5 years ago

For the other canonical query, try "mesothelioma." An info box on the right, and four ads on the left.

At one time, this was the highest-priced ad in Google (idk if it still is), because personal injury lawyers were desperate to get clients.

ummonk• 5 years ago

It’s not just legal risk but PR risk as well it’s hat they’re trying to avoid. Notice how the press often gets its hands on and makes a big deal out of shocking comments made by a few random employees in a company employing tens of thousands.

greatgib4• 5 years ago

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.

I had a lunch with a few people including some Google engineers a few days after the leak. A discussion started about this topic, and the googlers said things like: "what a scandal the leak, we hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to have him dead. If anyone in the company find who he his, we would seriously punch his face".

I was surprised, because, this was just a leak of the features, same content has what would have been disclosed in the PR announcement. Personally I would be happy that people have so much interest in my product that they spontaneously reshare early details about it. I did not see where the offense was for some random engineers of the company.

So, I asked them, and they told me that they felt that the insider "stole their announcement of their product".

I told them that it is ridiculous, because as an engineer you should like that your product is known, and that people hear and talk about it. But it should personally make no difference if the feature list/preview is published a few days earlier by a leak instead of by a random PR guy or by a big head of the company.

The only offended one might be the big head and the PR/marketing guys that had their plan ruined, but not common Google software engineer salarymen.

But the Googlers were not able to understand this idea, and then, they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even having suggested that their feeling might not be justified.

So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google was bad for them personally!

In the exact same way that there are dictator led countries were most of the inhabitants are blindly following whatever the dictator says is the truth!

wccrawford• 5 years ago

I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but I would definitely be pissed at them.

There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's presenting it their way.

Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someone else tells the punchline, they get upset about it. According to your logic, they shouldn't. The joke was told, and the audience heard it. But I've yet to meet anyone who wouldn't be upset about someone else telling the punchline to their joke.

They were not brainwashed. You were incredibly insensitive to their feelings.

greatgib4• 5 years ago

If you are an engineer working on the software, the announcement really has little interest. You just want it to be wide and sure not being done in a way that put a bad light on your product.

This kind of things happened in my case, and I was more happy to see the interest of the potential users than knowing who disclosed it as it would not be me anyway in all cases.

It might not be true in a small company/team/product. But in a big tech corps, the guy that will do the official announcement is usually quite far and unrelated to the engineers that did the feature.

Also, maybe a piece that was missing from my story is that the Googlers were not even in a team working or related to the disclosed thing. For example they were in the chrome team and it was an Android announcement or something like that.

Another point is that, at Google, it looks like that each big product team is firewalled from the other team. For example, people not working on Android core will not know anything about it or it's development and be in separated buildings and co.

amelius3• 5 years ago

As an engineer you should be focused on delivering objective value, not subjective value.

toast0• 5 years ago

To some degree, having the work discussed is great. But depending on the way it leaked, it can diminish the focus on the product, and sometimes it can make the official release flop and that's not great.

From what I hear, Google has/had a policy/culture of largely free information flow inside the company while not having information flow outside the company; a leak undermines that culture/policy and leads to more locked down information flow on the inside, and it's reasonable to be upset about that.

they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even having suggested that their feeling might not be justified.

People don't usually apprechiate it when they're upset and others tell them their feelings aren't justified and they should feel differently. That's simply not a good way to engage people.

jeffbee• 5 years ago

Yes, this happened at Google, in a huge way. Ten years ago you would hear interesting things at TGIF, the weekly informational company-wide event people would demo not-yet-launched software and hardware, discuss R&D, etc. After such a lot of cumulative leaks people stopped saying anything interesting at TGIF. You'd get information faster by reading the company press releases than by waiting for Friday.

It's not like the leakers did some kind of noble service, either. They were just assholes who destroyed something nice.

aix13• 5 years ago

Google has/had a policy/culture of largely free information flow inside the company

Sadly, this is "had" rather than "has" (it was the latter until a few years ago). As you point out, not least due to leaks.

brandmeyer2• 5 years ago

So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google was bad for them personally!

I think your interpretation of this experience is incorrect. Their visceral reaction was against leaking specifically, not negative information generally. Part of the propaganda behind TGIF, the internal newsletters, and so on is the idea that this inside information is part of what makes you special as a Googler.

"...we hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to have him dead."

While I'm sure you caught a big fish that day, I'm also sure it wasn't that big (come on: the retelling of this anecdote does not need quite that much exaggeration).

greatgib4• 5 years ago

While I'm sure you caught a big fish that day, I'm also sure it wasn't that big (come on: the retelling of this anecdote does not need quite that much exaggeration).

I don't exaggerate that point, the sentence was not exactly that but something very excessive and very close to that.

This is the intensity and violence of their feeling that shocked me to the point that I still remember this case after around 5/6 years or more.

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

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 very TGIFs.

Now I certainly wouldn't be talking about "punching people" or "wanting them dead"... But I am not happy when my coworkers violate trust by leaking. Unless we're talking about gross ethics violations, harassment, etc. leaking internal stuff doesn't improve anything for anybody except maybe the ego of the leaker.

ocdtrekkie2• 5 years ago

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.

benatkin• 5 years ago

It can get pretty nasty. Last year @jaffathecake who works at Google called @getify's "language" Trump-like for trying to raise the alarm about Chrome looking at hiding the path from the URL bar until the URL bar is focused, like Safari does. The original tweet is deleted, so you can't check whether it was "sowing division", but it wasn't IMO.

https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1275030931577896962

Edit: This is very similar to how Google used their blog to criticize Rand Fishkin, as mentioned in the article. Here's the official post from Google, which reads like a personal attack: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-sends-more...

_2d302• 5 years ago

It's hilarious to me that someone thinks this is about controlling thought and not a defensive legal maneuver.

ehsankia• 5 years ago

It's also absurd to me how the answer to "how can folks with whom I generally respect have reached such a significant gap in thinking?" is basically "they must be brainwashed by their Communicating Safely training"... That's such terrible way of dismissing someone who has a different opinion than you.

ggm• 5 years ago

You just dismissed them yourself didn't you? "thats a terrible way" is an emotional cast to disregard the logic in the argument. Its lawyer speak. HOW DARE YOU style rebuttal.

Or.. maybe you're just using english with its rhetorical richness? the quality of emphasis is not meant to imply actual dislike or distain? In which case.. why can't you ascribe the same motive of language style to the original author?

_2d302• 5 years ago

Totally. This whole thing is just wild to me.

throwaway2048• 5 years ago

I mean it can easily be both at the same time.

minism• 5 years ago

Right. This seems to be needlessly overcomplicating/obfuscating whats going on.

bickeringyokel• 5 years ago

How large a market share does a company need to be a monopoly? Search seems like more of an oligopoly, is there a legal definition of market size for something to be a monopoly or is it more of a case by case thing?

I'd say youtube is probably the closest thing they have to a monopoly, but even then there's tiktok, ig/Facebook etc. Those probably count as video "creator" platforms.

jgalt212• 5 years ago

But are there two groups at Google:

Group A: not allowed to talk about monopoly

Group B: The group tasked with maintaining the monopoly.

harryf• 5 years ago

Not directly related but I have a theory that Google has shaped public opinion online - and been very good at it- in a couple of instances when there was a risk to their business.

The first was net neutrality, where you found various think tanks doing stuff like YouTube explaining why it’s bad to lose net neutrality. Once I dug into who was funding one of those think tanks and it looked a lot like Google. Given the % of bandwidth that is people watching YouTube, Google had potentially some big bills coming their way with the loss of net neutrality.

The other one is Kevin Rudd in Australia taking on Rupert Murdoch while Google is at risk of having to share ad revenue on news with NewsCorp. I haven’t researched this much but the question is simply who’s funding Kevin Rudd to fight Murdoch.

Animats• 5 years ago

The real issue is redefining the market. This is common in antitrust cases.

I could see an antitrust decision that forced Google to sell off the third-party ad, ad tracking, video streaming, email, messaging, and phone businesses, while retaining the search and search ad business. Then at least they couldn't use one monopoly to promote others.

ineedasername• 5 years ago

For a more complete look at the concept that linguistic structure & lexicon set the boundaries of thought, see the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [0]. Spoiler alert: the "strong" version doesn't quite hold up under experimental scrutiny, but the "light" version has some legs.

As a bonus, follow-up with George Lakoff's Metaphors we Live By.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

kens2• 5 years ago

I second your recommendation of Metaphors we live by. It is a book that had a lasting impact on how I view the world and I think most HN readers would find it interesting.

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

Thats not Googlespeak. Thats legal protection. Whenever a company is open to investigation you can bet emails will be searched and if something suggesting something borderline illegal is written there it can be used against you. A lot of companiea give such trainings to their employees.

_nalply3• 5 years ago

Perhaps you could view Googlespeak as a side-effect of the legal protection.

playpause2• 5 years ago

Unclear how any of this means it’s not Googlespeak.

altgoogler• 5 years ago

It's not clear to you how standard business practices aren't some sort of Google-specific Orwellian new-speak?

NoblePublius• 5 years ago

I was expecting some analysis of what you tweeted to the Google people that was outside their vocabulary.

afterburner• 5 years ago

But to the Googlers, it was as if I was speaking another language.

I mean, they are literally being paid not to understand.

ilaksh• 5 years ago

No one is going to appreciate this but I will say it anyway just because I think it's important and maybe one person will get it.

The solution to these type of technopolies is not better laws or lawsuits. The solution is technical. It's about creating protocols for decentralized systems.

Now, am I saying that it's obvious or easy to replace Google with decentralized systems? Of course not. But what I hope people will eventually realize is that open source distributed protocols are in fact extremely powerful and perfect for creating better public online commons.

realjohng• 5 years ago

You know you're good when you get to top of HN with polar opposite stories: driving the future with waymo and killing the future with monopoly.

Somebody should beat Google w features. bing anybody?

randomperson_242• 5 years ago

It is also not just Google. Google atleast curates the content, but has anyone used MSN or Edge (that comes with Windows)?

It has all news stories copied word to word from other news websites. Its worse than AMP. The publication name is not mentioned till the end of the page.

trhway• 5 years ago

Now somebody should make a reverse translation app to produce real meaning behind that BS bingo Googlespeak. And it probably may find the use well beyond the Googlespeak - just look at any business or political PR/spin.

deathanatos• 5 years ago

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 competition, find ways to prevent competitors from competing fairly with us" etc. — someone like the author would write an article vilifying them. (And rightly so.) So the company instead says "focus on our product; competition is good and okay" and … they're vilified for it. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

By this article's twisted logic, any company focused on their product is just engaging in newspeak for thinly veiled anti-competitive behavior. Or is it just if Google does it?

(It kills me to argue this, since I think normally these threads/articles spawn good debate about the size and scope of FAANG. But… this one is ridiculous.)

dennisblue• 5 years ago

I disagree.

Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is not the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.

B-Con2• 5 years ago

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.

kettleballroll• 5 years ago

You're being cryptic. The people your criticizing (this might include me, i have no way of knowing) will not be able to learn anything from your reply. It would be more constructive I'd you shared your thoughts so we'd have a chance to improve. What is your point, exactly? Spell it out for us, please.

makeitdouble2• 5 years ago

Accusing interpretations of being "uncharitable" feels really odd when we're talking about communication training material. It's not some Slack thread taken out of context, we're reading quotes from reviewed and crafted material.

Also I don't see how changing "Cut off competitors' access to target" to "Integrate target with Google" matches your idealistic view of "focus on our product; competition is good and okay".

They basically acknowledge competition will be crushed, and are asking for appropriate communication to avoid troubles. It makes sense from Google's point of view, but I don't see why we should be advocating for them in any way.

ma2rten3• 5 years ago

I think you are reading something into it that is not necessarily there. The slides give examples of things that are appropriate to say and are not appropriate to say. It doesn't necessarily mean that one thing has to changed into the other.

Razengan2• 5 years ago

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".

That is a very charitable interpretation of the training materials.

audunw• 5 years ago

Whether it is charitable or uncharitable depends on your subjective interpretation of the intent of the training material. But I think the focus on not talking about market share is a huge sign that this material is not written with good intentions. That makes very little sense.

If the material was written exactly the opposite, it'd almost make more sense, most companies want a high awareness of their market share... unless they're worried about being hit with an anti-trust case.

And so, when it comes to banning phrases like "crush the competition" it's not that rule alone which is worrying, it's the whole package.

Your argument is also a bit flawed, in that the alternative isn't training material that encourages talking about "crushing the competition". The realistic alternative is that the training material wouldn't have to mention it at all. Either because the company doesn't have a problem with that kind of culture, or because the company isn't close to being a monopoly, such that talking about "crushing the competition" would just be interpreted as healthy competitiveness.

krsdcbl• 5 years ago

But it is not training material that tries to convey "focus on the product".

It's literally communication guidelines of a profit oriented company dominating it's market in a monopolistic way that says "avoid talking about market or market share, this is bad"

The only way to have a "charitable" interpretation of this is to partake in their game, imho.

Yizahi• 5 years ago

To simplify - if the actions of an entity are bad (or perceived as bad), then whether they are saying truth about those actions or lies - DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL. So yes, indeed, Google will be damned whatever they say, as long as their actions stay the same.

BiteCode_dev2• 5 years ago

Your comment shows that it works, exactly like the article says it does.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

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.

jewelry• 5 years ago

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.

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

monopolies, conglomerates, cartels, monocultures, oligarchies, fragility, lack of diversity, lack of options, lack of checks and balances, inequity...

any way you slice it this cluster of words represents a way of organizing society that is suboptimal and detrimental. anything that can be done by one entity can be done better by multiple competing entities if they are forced to operate in a coopetitive environment.

nobody should have to "prove" anything in the messy specific circumstances of particular industries and companies. society and its economic/political organization should have automatic triggers and disincentives that would prohibit the formation of such structures in the first place.

loopion• 5 years ago

When he mention the bad word « market » and « competitors » this is also the case at PayPal on our compliance program. But this is under Anti-Bribery program. It’s just to avoid having proof against you.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Good: Google's mission is to sell more ads

Bad: Google's mission is to organize the world's information

bertttles• 5 years ago

"Google’s Growing Antitrust Tsunami" - says it all!

hnbad• 5 years ago

It's odd to see so many comments siding with Google on this one considering HN historically celebrates small startups "disrupting" existing markets and sides against big monopolists and Google especially.

I wonder if this is a consequence of early-stage underdog startups having grown to significant sizes over time (or being bought out by the more established competitors) and loyalties continuing to align with those companies rather than their original positions.

Maybe the US's political polarization of the discourse around regulating "big tech" (with the anti-regulation Republicans insisting on tight regulations and the "pro-regulation" Democrats siding against it in response) is also having an effect.

I don't know when I last saw so many people implicitly arguing Google is not acting anti-competitively or that antitrust laws are just a pesky legal technicality that is moral and just to guard against by shaping your company's internal communication about your market dominance.

disillusioned• 5 years ago

My friend has told me that Amazon has much the same _very strict_ limitations on language and messaging around certain terms, especially in any retained messaging. He also mentioned that his unit doesn't retain Chimes past 30 days or so, specifically to avoid ever having it used in discovery.

graderjs• 5 years ago

It's interesting this language creates a reality where only Google exists. Apart from the legal and 'anti-trust' aspects, I'm sure this is useful for creating a sense of manifest destiny, where Google is the only service that people see. I'm sure that is eventually inevitable, that search becomes like an intelligent agent and there is a single company that provides it. Other people see a future based on individuals granting different AIs permission to mine their personal data in return for personalized services...which would also be an interesting future.

But I think we are definitely headed for a single-massive company providing all intelligent search at least for a time. It just seems like that will be the best way to get the best version of that product, until we actually know what that product really is.

That AI search company may not be Google, and if not that would be a fascinating story to see how such a player emerged as underdog to become the dominant search provider in a Google-dominated world. Exciting times!

indiantinker• 5 years ago

Longtime ago, I made a small installation [1] at an HCI conf about the same larger issue. Increasing Search Engines seem to train people by judging their inherent confirmation bias. I think many recommendation engines also try to do the same to a lower extend by keep the 'subject' happy. It was interesting to see how designers from leading companies present never thought their work actually makes people live in bubbles and they always think it was 'UX friendly'.

[1] http://rohitg.in/2017/09/03/whowe/

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

I don't particularly like Google, but it is obvious that they are in the "Everything you say may be used against you" situation and they cannot simply take the fifth and cut off any communication among employees.

If you need to take into account that every single message sent over internal media may be one day combed by hostile investigators for anything that might be considered your wrongdoing, you need to be careful, regardless of your size.

a_imho• 5 years ago

The other way around, classic 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it'. Googlespeak can be a crutch in the process, but I don't think it is the root cause.

warmfuzzykitten• 5 years ago

I have a problem getting to his point when the examples he shows at the start are so unlike what I see when I enter the same search phrases.

"COVID-19 trends in Palm Beach" didn't bring up any hotel listings. Instead I get statistics, cases, and a map of cases from the New York Times, and after that a list of ordinary links.

"the walking dead season 11" showed an ad from AMCPlus.com, which is fairly understandable since it's totally on point, followed by regular links, the first to wikipedia.

I know that what individuals see is customized to some extent, but I can't imagine what sort of search history he has that would get the results he shows.

If his examples are not typical, it seems possible his premise is flawed.

Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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