19 ms·

It seems odd to me that they would make such move in the first place without proper legal analysis. Especially, given that it's fintech which already is quite t

by 3jckd 8y ago

It seems odd to me that they would make such move in the first place without proper legal analysis. Especially, given that it's fintech which already is quite tightly regulated and Robinhood has been in the stock game for a while as well. Or was it just "the magical ampersand" as the article suggests and hope that they would slide under the radar.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
We shouldn't rule out the possibility that they did have seemingly proper legal analysis, it just wasn't complete.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  Robinhood has been in the game long enough and has had enough support at all levels such that it's hard to attribute their actions to ignorance.
- brootstrap 8y ago
  This is fair, but if you are a zillion dollar startup company and can not see what is so blatantly obvious to the general public, you have to question the efforts... For me it's actually hilarious. The follow-up response letter from the founders group is hilarious. If , robinhood did have a legal team to audit this new tool, they suck ass. They probably made a couple hundo thousand a pop, didnt do any work, and they are now living their lives just a tad richer.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Eh, I think you immediately run into one of the lawyer-earmarks of a scam in that case. A lawyer can't really tell you what will happen in a novel situation. They can speak with great confidence about legal precedents and where the law is black and white, but once you start walking into the grey areas, where the law isn't clear and there is no precedent, the law isn't a computer program interpreted by machines. There's a whole layer of human judgement in deciding what happens in that case, you don't just overflow onto the stack and get to rewrite the legal code to suit your needs. So when a lawyer says something like, "Ahh, but the law only talks about 'checking accounts' and 'savings accounts' not 'checking & savings accounts'", at best they are giving you a preview of the argument they will make to a judge or jury at your trial. Then future lawyers will be able to refer back to the precedents set in your court case with more confidence.
  - jdpedrie 8y ago
    I think this is an insightful point. Lawyers are largely trained in reading and applying precedent. That said, one would think a responsible company would have received best and worst case guidance from a team of attorneys who could have easily expected this as a possible and perhaps probable outcome. In other words, "this hasn't been tested in court" doesn't excuse them from apparently not bothering to get an opinion from the regulators who have the potential to greatly embarrass them after a high-profile product launch.
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      Yes, this is precisely my confusion. I would have expected a good lawyer (of the sort a major fintech startup should employ) to say something more like: "This language doesn't directly violate the rules, and hasn't seen a court case. But it looks like an unsubtle attempt to bypass those rules and a big announcement using this approach is at minimum likely to draw some unfriendly scrutiny." The law isn't a computer, and regulators - especially in financial spaces - have substantially more freedom than courts to simply reject loopholes. Things like structuring rules are essentially "laws against circumventing the law" for exactly this reason. I'm pretty surprised that Robinhood either didn't get a warning about how poorly this could go, or chose to ignore it.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > The law isn't a computer, and regulators - especially in financial spaces - have substantially more freedom than courts to simply reject loopholes. Regulators have strictly less power than courts here when applying existing law and regulation, though they can write new regulations (but not law).
        Bartweiss 8y ago
        > Regulators have strictly less power than courts here when applying existing... regulation I guess it's a matter of terminology, but I think there are at least some cases where this isn't true. Ex post facto legislation is permitted in civil law, but it's not something courts can generate in response to a case. Regulators operating under administrative law can create ex post facto rules wholesale if granted express permission by Congress, which is of course new regulation. But even without that grant, they can create limited retroactive rulings when new interpretations are offered during adjudication. [1] We can debate whether that's 'new regulation' or 'new interpretations of old regulation', but the net result is that regulators are empowered to cover unforeseen circumstances in ways that direct lawsuits are unlikely to offer. (I am not a lawyer, but...) a move like this looks like an invitation for a Chenery II action, if one is was even needed. The SIPC didn't want to issue brokerage-account protections for a "Checking & Savings Account", and whatever the SEC said to Robinhood produced a very swift change of tune. I suspect it was something like "if we go into adjudication and say magic ampersands don't change your issuing rights, every court in the country will back us up". [1] http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Schmitter_MLR1.pdf http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02...
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Even if I buy that (I don't), it doesn't explain the fact that they were marketing the account as SICP insured when it very obviously was not. They didn't say "we hope for these accounts to be insured in the near future!", they said that it _is_.
  - astura 8y ago
    I'm not excusing their behavior here, but just to clarify, they thought their existing SIPC insurance would cover this new account. So they didn't lie so much as they made an assumption and were grossly mistaken.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Ok I better understand you now. Still, that makes little sense to me. They have reportedly been working on this product for two years[1]. Are we two believe that they never once reached out and asked "hey, you guys cool with this?" It's either gross incompetence or something more nefarious. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/12/13/in-a-bold-asset-grab-robinhood-offers-3-interest-on-checking-and-savings-accounts/#3e8c2771341a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/12/13/in-a-bol...
      - PeterisP 8y ago
        SICP themselves stated that they were not consulted nor informed about this, so yes, it does seem that they never once reached out and asked.
      - astura 8y ago
        They didn't think to reach out to the SIPC , the SIPC themselves confirmed that the announcement was the first time they were hearing about the new account. Was all over HN and other sites a day after the announcement.
        EpicEng 8y ago
        Yeah I worded that in an odd way. What I meant to imply was "it's insane that they didn't reach out to the SICP"
- rchaud 8y ago
  The "Letter from Founders" mea culpa linked to in the article only says "we promise to work more closely with regulators". If they were confident about their legal position prior to the announcement, they would have said so.
jklein11 8y ago
excuse my ignorance but what is the magical ampersand? edit: Doh.. I guess I just got caught commenting without reading the article. Sorry everybody!
- MBCook 8y ago
  It’s mentioned in the article, the author appears to have coined it for the original story. “Checking” accounts are regulated. “Savings” accounts are regulated. “Checking & Savings” accounts are not a thing and thus could be considered a grey area. The ampersand magically gets you out of regulation. Well, it DIDN’T, but that was the theory it seems.
  - morpheuskafka 8y ago
    I don't think they ever tested that--the issue was with SPIC saying they would not protect the accounts, not with the banking authorities saying the name was misleading.
- XCabbage 8y ago
  It's in the article. Use CTRL-F.
- _hardwaregeek 8y ago
  According to the article: > Robinhood can’t issue a “checking account,” or a “savings account,” since those are things only banks can do, but “checking & savings” is technically neither of those things and so perhaps it falls into a gray area. “A magic ampersand,” I called it.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  Matt Levine opined (tongue in cheek, as is his usual style) that Robinhood may have thought that “Robinhood Checking & savings” was distinguishable from a checking and savings bank account and so could be regulated differently because of the ampersand, in a previous “money stuff” “”” There is a lot of confusion about what Robinhood’s thing is. Delightfully, it is called “Robinhood Checking & Savings,” apparently because calling it a “checking account” or a “savings account” would come too close to implying that it is a real bank account insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., while “checking & savings” is not a thing and so does not carry that implication. A magic ampersand! “”” https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-14/nyse-needed-some-pretend-traders https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-14/nyse-n...
Kinnard 8y ago
They should have just gone with `Friend to Friend & Interest Yielding` Man I can't wait to be done with the banking cartel!
- simias 8y ago
  TFA anticipated your comment: > One possible explanation for the regulatory efficiency here is that so many of fintech’s financial innovations have been tried before. Robinhood was certainly not the first non-bank to get the bright idea of pretending to be a bank and taking deposits! [...] > In many areas of “tech,” companies are racing to do things—in virtual reality, in artificial intelligence, in surveillance and data collection—that have genuinely never been done before and that pose novel social and regulatory challenges. In many areas of fintech, though, companies are racing to do things that were done in the 1920s, before modern financial regulation came into effect, only this time with an app. The regulators know how to handle that.
freediver 8y ago
It could be just a publicity stunt. Announce an unbelievable thing, get ton of attention and then figure it out later.
- SilasX 8y ago
  So, like the Chase Sapphire Card model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056408
  - pmart123 8y ago
    The mass promotion of the Chase Sapphire card coincidentally corresponded with the roll out of Apple Pay. Perhaps this could have been complete luck, but part of me wonders whether JP Morgan isn't given enough credit for this given its a huge advantage if you become someone's default credit card in Apple Pay.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  They got negative attention. Would you trust a company with your life savings, after they didn't bother making a phone call to SIPC to ensure something as basic as the insurance status on your accounts? The timing was also terrible, right after their big crash earlier in the week. Every single interview addressed that. Where trust is involved, bad publicity can be worse than no publicity.
  - freediver 8y ago
    Besides "all attention is good", simply compare the amount of media attention for the original news vs this "negative" one. It still looks like one of the most successful announcements from branding ROI perspective.
    - morpheuskafka 8y ago
      Further, no trust was ever requested or place. IIRC they didn't even have a waitlist or anything. They just announced that they were going to launch a product in the future and now are redesigning it some more. Furthermore, this fits into their narrative of disruption. Their target audience will likely see this as, "stupid big banking industry trying to make it hard for them again."
Derek_MK 8y ago
It seems to be one of two options, IMO: 1. They are doing everything like this (i.e. with not enough legal analysis), and have only just now happened to do something illegal. This would make sense if the top-level people at Robinhood were techbros and not people with experience in finance, but that seems kind of unlikely given that they're able to set up an investment app in the first place - I would assume that's very hard to do if you're not already neck-deep in that industry. 2. They are (for some reason) trying to set this up as a "Robinhood vs The Man (tm)" thing. They're already branding themselves hard on the "Giving financial freedom to the average person" thing, and I could totally see this giving them some free advertisement if they choose to take advantage of the "Big bad government hurting poor people's opportunities!!!" idea.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  Their Chief Compliance Officer isn't an attorney. That's a major red flag.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > They are (for some reason) trying to set this up as a "Robinhood vs The Man (tm)" thing. They are banking (unintentional pun) way too hard on "millennial research" telling them that the '82-'04 crowd wants "a meaningful connection" with their jobs, and apparently, their financial services provider. Maybe this is how they're hoping to relate to them? The connotations of "Robin Hood" are such that it's a pretty brazen name to pick. Especially so when you consider that it's a VC-funded startup that will almost certainly go to a Too Big To Fail institution when an IPO beckons.
filmgirlcw 8y ago
I think this is an example of the SV/startup mentality that regulations don't matter and just do it, it'll be fine. And in a lot of cases it is. But not in something as tightly regulated as banking -- and not when as the Bloomberg piece astutely points out, the "innovation" in question was already done in the 20s before regulation. It's like crypto Ponzi schemes. People who start them think they are doing something innovative, when really, it's the same "robbing Peter to pay Paul" trick that existed long before Charles Ponzi and his postal reply coupons scam made it a household name. And yet, investors still willingly invest in clear Ponzis, because they are convinced the math will work! The math never works. (To be clear, I think there is a difference between someone like Charles Ponzi and the BitConnect scamsters and the people who invested with Madoff. Madoff was successful for so long, in part because he didn't promise ridiculously outrageous returns. He was running a Ponzi, but what made him so much worse was that it looked legit to investors, whereas most Ponzis offer returns that are never sustainable and look weird to a more savvy investor.) I'm not implying Robinhood is a Ponzi, btw, but I think what it did here by actively misleading the public is really gross and I've lost all respect for the startup and will never give them a cent -- "free" trades or not.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  I mean there were a bunch of people in cryptocurrencies running clearly labeled ponzis. I remember one person getting scared after hundreds of people actually bought into their ponzi smart contract (that clearly explained what it was).
  - Slippery_John 8y ago
    I believe that was PonziCoin
    - filmgirlcw 8y ago
      LOL. Yes -- I forgot about that! Oh man, the alt-boom the last half of 2017 was really fun -- provided you didn't put any money into anything!
reaperducer 8y ago
It seems odd to me that they would make such move in the first place without proper legal analysis As we hear repeatedly on HN from Google's Dragonfly apologists, it's perfectly normal to keep the legal department out of the loop in modern-day "disruptive" businesses.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I wonder if it's the same people who complain that the marketing & sales department make their lives hell because they keep adding features to close sales, and then tell the devs to build those features because the deals depend on it.
mandeepj 8y ago
They got a lot of free marketing out of it ( little bit negative but not too bad)

by 3jckd 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago

We shouldn't rule out the possibility that they did have seemingly proper legal analysis, it just wasn't complete.

minimaxir 8y ago
Robinhood has been in the game long enough and has had enough support at all levels such that it's hard to attribute their actions to ignorance.
brootstrap 8y ago
This is fair, but if you are a zillion dollar startup company and can not see what is so blatantly obvious to the general public, you have to question the efforts... For me it's actually hilarious. The follow-up response letter from the founders group is hilarious. If , robinhood did have a legal team to audit this new tool, they suck ass. They probably made a couple hundo thousand a pop, didnt do any work, and they are now living their lives just a tad richer.
saalweachter 8y ago
Eh, I think you immediately run into one of the lawyer-earmarks of a scam in that case. A lawyer can't really tell you what will happen in a novel situation. They can speak with great confidence about legal precedents and where the law is black and white, but once you start walking into the grey areas, where the law isn't clear and there is no precedent, the law isn't a computer program interpreted by machines. There's a whole layer of human judgement in deciding what happens in that case, you don't just overflow onto the stack and get to rewrite the legal code to suit your needs. So when a lawyer says something like, "Ahh, but the law only talks about 'checking accounts' and 'savings accounts' not 'checking & savings accounts'", at best they are giving you a preview of the argument they will make to a judge or jury at your trial. Then future lawyers will be able to refer back to the precedents set in your court case with more confidence.
- jdpedrie 8y ago
  I think this is an insightful point. Lawyers are largely trained in reading and applying precedent. That said, one would think a responsible company would have received best and worst case guidance from a team of attorneys who could have easily expected this as a possible and perhaps probable outcome. In other words, "this hasn't been tested in court" doesn't excuse them from apparently not bothering to get an opinion from the regulators who have the potential to greatly embarrass them after a high-profile product launch.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    Yes, this is precisely my confusion. I would have expected a good lawyer (of the sort a major fintech startup should employ) to say something more like: "This language doesn't directly violate the rules, and hasn't seen a court case. But it looks like an unsubtle attempt to bypass those rules and a big announcement using this approach is at minimum likely to draw some unfriendly scrutiny." The law isn't a computer, and regulators - especially in financial spaces - have substantially more freedom than courts to simply reject loopholes. Things like structuring rules are essentially "laws against circumventing the law" for exactly this reason. I'm pretty surprised that Robinhood either didn't get a warning about how poorly this could go, or chose to ignore it.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The law isn't a computer, and regulators - especially in financial spaces - have substantially more freedom than courts to simply reject loopholes. Regulators have strictly less power than courts here when applying existing law and regulation, though they can write new regulations (but not law).
      - Bartweiss 8y ago
        > Regulators have strictly less power than courts here when applying existing... regulation I guess it's a matter of terminology, but I think there are at least some cases where this isn't true. Ex post facto legislation is permitted in civil law, but it's not something courts can generate in response to a case. Regulators operating under administrative law can create ex post facto rules wholesale if granted express permission by Congress, which is of course new regulation. But even without that grant, they can create limited retroactive rulings when new interpretations are offered during adjudication. [1] We can debate whether that's 'new regulation' or 'new interpretations of old regulation', but the net result is that regulators are empowered to cover unforeseen circumstances in ways that direct lawsuits are unlikely to offer. (I am not a lawyer, but...) a move like this looks like an invitation for a Chenery II action, if one is was even needed. The SIPC didn't want to issue brokerage-account protections for a "Checking & Savings Account", and whatever the SEC said to Robinhood produced a very swift change of tune. I suspect it was something like "if we go into adjudication and say magic ampersands don't change your issuing rights, every court in the country will back us up". [1] http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Schmitter_MLR1.pdf http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02...
EpicEng 8y ago
Even if I buy that (I don't), it doesn't explain the fact that they were marketing the account as SICP insured when it very obviously was not. They didn't say "we hope for these accounts to be insured in the near future!", they said that it _is_.
- astura 8y ago
  I'm not excusing their behavior here, but just to clarify, they thought their existing SIPC insurance would cover this new account. So they didn't lie so much as they made an assumption and were grossly mistaken.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Ok I better understand you now. Still, that makes little sense to me. They have reportedly been working on this product for two years[1]. Are we two believe that they never once reached out and asked "hey, you guys cool with this?" It's either gross incompetence or something more nefarious. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/12/13/in-a-bold-asset-grab-robinhood-offers-3-interest-on-checking-and-savings-accounts/#3e8c2771341a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/12/13/in-a-bol...
    - PeterisP 8y ago
      SICP themselves stated that they were not consulted nor informed about this, so yes, it does seem that they never once reached out and asked.
    - astura 8y ago
      They didn't think to reach out to the SIPC , the SIPC themselves confirmed that the announcement was the first time they were hearing about the new account. Was all over HN and other sites a day after the announcement.
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        Yeah I worded that in an odd way. What I meant to imply was "it's insane that they didn't reach out to the SICP"
rchaud 8y ago
The "Letter from Founders" mea culpa linked to in the article only says "we promise to work more closely with regulators". If they were confident about their legal position prior to the announcement, they would have said so.

jklein11 8y ago

excuse my ignorance but what is the magical ampersand? edit: Doh.. I guess I just got caught commenting without reading the article. Sorry everybody!

MBCook 8y ago
It’s mentioned in the article, the author appears to have coined it for the original story. “Checking” accounts are regulated. “Savings” accounts are regulated. “Checking & Savings” accounts are not a thing and thus could be considered a grey area. The ampersand magically gets you out of regulation. Well, it DIDN’T, but that was the theory it seems.
- morpheuskafka 8y ago
  I don't think they ever tested that--the issue was with SPIC saying they would not protect the accounts, not with the banking authorities saying the name was misleading.
XCabbage 8y ago
It's in the article. Use CTRL-F.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
According to the article: > Robinhood can’t issue a “checking account,” or a “savings account,” since those are things only banks can do, but “checking & savings” is technically neither of those things and so perhaps it falls into a gray area. “A magic ampersand,” I called it.
mattnewton 8y ago
Matt Levine opined (tongue in cheek, as is his usual style) that Robinhood may have thought that “Robinhood Checking & savings” was distinguishable from a checking and savings bank account and so could be regulated differently because of the ampersand, in a previous “money stuff” “”” There is a lot of confusion about what Robinhood’s thing is. Delightfully, it is called “Robinhood Checking & Savings,” apparently because calling it a “checking account” or a “savings account” would come too close to implying that it is a real bank account insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., while “checking & savings” is not a thing and so does not carry that implication. A magic ampersand! “”” https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-14/nyse-needed-some-pretend-traders https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-14/nyse-n...

Kinnard 8y ago

They should have just gone with `Friend to Friend & Interest Yielding` Man I can't wait to be done with the banking cartel!

simias 8y ago
TFA anticipated your comment: > One possible explanation for the regulatory efficiency here is that so many of fintech’s financial innovations have been tried before. Robinhood was certainly not the first non-bank to get the bright idea of pretending to be a bank and taking deposits! [...] > In many areas of “tech,” companies are racing to do things—in virtual reality, in artificial intelligence, in surveillance and data collection—that have genuinely never been done before and that pose novel social and regulatory challenges. In many areas of fintech, though, companies are racing to do things that were done in the 1920s, before modern financial regulation came into effect, only this time with an app. The regulators know how to handle that.

freediver 8y ago

It could be just a publicity stunt. Announce an unbelievable thing, get ton of attention and then figure it out later.

SilasX 8y ago
So, like the Chase Sapphire Card model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16056408
- pmart123 8y ago
  The mass promotion of the Chase Sapphire card coincidentally corresponded with the roll out of Apple Pay. Perhaps this could have been complete luck, but part of me wonders whether JP Morgan isn't given enough credit for this given its a huge advantage if you become someone's default credit card in Apple Pay.
dunpeal 8y ago
They got negative attention. Would you trust a company with your life savings, after they didn't bother making a phone call to SIPC to ensure something as basic as the insurance status on your accounts? The timing was also terrible, right after their big crash earlier in the week. Every single interview addressed that. Where trust is involved, bad publicity can be worse than no publicity.
- freediver 8y ago
  Besides "all attention is good", simply compare the amount of media attention for the original news vs this "negative" one. It still looks like one of the most successful announcements from branding ROI perspective.
  - morpheuskafka 8y ago
    Further, no trust was ever requested or place. IIRC they didn't even have a waitlist or anything. They just announced that they were going to launch a product in the future and now are redesigning it some more. Furthermore, this fits into their narrative of disruption. Their target audience will likely see this as, "stupid big banking industry trying to make it hard for them again."

Derek_MK 8y ago

It seems to be one of two options, IMO: 1. They are doing everything like this (i.e. with not enough legal analysis), and have only just now happened to do something illegal. This would make sense if the top-level people at Robinhood were techbros and not people with experience in finance, but that seems kind of unlikely given that they're able to set up an investment app in the first place - I would assume that's very hard to do if you're not already neck-deep in that industry. 2. They are (for some reason) trying to set this up as a "Robinhood vs The Man (tm)" thing. They're already branding themselves hard on the "Giving financial freedom to the average person" thing, and I could totally see this giving them some free advertisement if they choose to take advantage of the "Big bad government hurting poor people's opportunities!!!" idea.

elliekelly 8y ago
Their Chief Compliance Officer isn't an attorney. That's a major red flag.
rchaud 8y ago
> They are (for some reason) trying to set this up as a "Robinhood vs The Man (tm)" thing. They are banking (unintentional pun) way too hard on "millennial research" telling them that the '82-'04 crowd wants "a meaningful connection" with their jobs, and apparently, their financial services provider. Maybe this is how they're hoping to relate to them? The connotations of "Robin Hood" are such that it's a pretty brazen name to pick. Especially so when you consider that it's a VC-funded startup that will almost certainly go to a Too Big To Fail institution when an IPO beckons.

filmgirlcw 8y ago

I think this is an example of the SV/startup mentality that regulations don't matter and just do it, it'll be fine. And in a lot of cases it is. But not in something as tightly regulated as banking -- and not when as the Bloomberg piece astutely points out, the "innovation" in question was already done in the 20s before regulation. It's like crypto Ponzi schemes. People who start them think they are doing something innovative, when really, it's the same "robbing Peter to pay Paul" trick that existed long before Charles Ponzi and his postal reply coupons scam made it a household name. And yet, investors still willingly invest in clear Ponzis, because they are convinced the math will work! The math never works. (To be clear, I think there is a difference between someone like Charles Ponzi and the BitConnect scamsters and the people who invested with Madoff. Madoff was successful for so long, in part because he didn't promise ridiculously outrageous returns. He was running a Ponzi, but what made him so much worse was that it looked legit to investors, whereas most Ponzis offer returns that are never sustainable and look weird to a more savvy investor.) I'm not implying Robinhood is a Ponzi, btw, but I think what it did here by actively misleading the public is really gross and I've lost all respect for the startup and will never give them a cent -- "free" trades or not.

Semaphor 8y ago
I mean there were a bunch of people in cryptocurrencies running clearly labeled ponzis. I remember one person getting scared after hundreds of people actually bought into their ponzi smart contract (that clearly explained what it was).
- Slippery_John 8y ago
  I believe that was PonziCoin
  - filmgirlcw 8y ago
    LOL. Yes -- I forgot about that! Oh man, the alt-boom the last half of 2017 was really fun -- provided you didn't put any money into anything!

reaperducer 8y ago

It seems odd to me that they would make such move in the first place without proper legal analysis As we hear repeatedly on HN from Google's Dragonfly apologists, it's perfectly normal to keep the legal department out of the loop in modern-day "disruptive" businesses.

rchaud 8y ago
I wonder if it's the same people who complain that the marketing & sales department make their lives hell because they keep adding features to close sales, and then tell the devs to build those features because the deals depend on it.

mandeepj 8y ago

They got a lot of free marketing out of it ( little bit negative but not too bad)