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Google’s lawyer accidentally made a sensitive document public

430 points by PretzelFisch 6y ago

cycomanic 6y ago
So will there be criminal charges brought. I highly doubt it. That is typically the problem, a normal person gets the book thrown at them (even if they e.g. commit a crime accidentally), while nobody goes after the big guys because it is deemed to be too expensive or some other reason.
- bendergarcia 6y ago
  It’s sad, even the place that is supposed to be fair isn’t due to money. Money rules too many of America’s systems. But I have a feeling that money will always find a way to be influential.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Money is just a proxy for power. Power is synonymous with influence.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      There are plenty of influential broke people. Just look at YouTube.
      - albatruss 6y ago
        Exactly. That's why money is a proxy, not equivalent to power.
        bendergarcia 6y ago
        A YouTuber cant use their likes to get the best lawyer can they? Even if they can (promos), it still means the legal system is unfair. The ones who benefit the system the most benefit from it.
        throwaway3699 6y ago
        Influencers can easily raise hundreds of thousands to fight legal cases if they have an audience that cares about their cause. Edit: s/YouTubers/Influencers
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - luckylion 6y ago
        And they can turn that influence into money very quickly. They might lose some of it when they cash in (or sell out), but it's pretty convertable.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        And the conversion rate is good at quantifying how much actual influence a person has. Which may be less than they think. How much influence a typical YouTuber with 10k subscribers have? Very little, actually - they can affect audience's thinking in a limited domain, or get them to buy some stuff to a limited degree. All restricted to how much a cohort of volunteers cares about what their entertainers tell them. Contrast that with a person wielding a $100. They can literally get someone to do almost anything for them for a couple of hours. Or, in general, they can exchange it for $100 worth of goods and services provided by an industrial civilization. That's what hard influence looks like.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    > even the place that is supposed to be fair isn’t due to money What place is that?
    - bendergarcia 6y ago
      The legal system (The court room)
- busterarm 6y ago
  That's exactly it. Rich people have the resources to fight for longer than you will hold your office. There's a really eye opening report 2 years ago from Charles Rettig, commissioner of the IRS, where he openly states that his agency focuses audits on poorer people, because they have less resources to fight and are more likely to just pay up and move on. Most of the audit resources are targeted at people claiming the earned income tax credit.
  - adventured 6y ago
    Edit: I provided actual data - facts - straight from the IRS. If you're going to downvote, I dare you to bring something to the table to counter reality (good luck). > where he openly states that his agency focuses audits on poorer people As incomes rise, audit % rates rise. The IRS does not focus a large share of its energy on poorer people. The people earning under $50,000 per year have a very low audit rate, and that's straight from the IRS data. Once your income climbs over $200,000 your audit rate begins to skyrocket. In terms of volume, 60% of all filers are at $50,000 or lower, so obviously even at a low % of audits they're still going to have a lot of audits. The IRS does audit people filing as having no income at a relatively high rate, because that category frequently attempts to use incorrect deductions to try to hide income. The rate of fraud is very high in that category. Here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2017ntf-irsauditstriggers.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2017ntf-irsauditstriggers.pd... "The majority of audited returns are for taxpayers who earn $500,000 a year or more, and most of them had incomes of over $1 million. These are the only income ranges that were subject to more than a 1% chance of an audit in 2018. " -- [note: the $500k+ group is the majority of audited returns despite the fact that they're a tiny share of all returns, which tells you how low the audit rate is for the poorer categories.] "According to IRS statistics, you’re safest if you report income in the neighborhood of $25,000 to $200,000. These taxpayers were audited the least in 2016." https://www.thebalance.com/top-audit-triggers-that-catch-irs-attention-4153034 https://www.thebalance.com/top-audit-triggers-that-catch-irs...
    - refenestrator 6y ago
      A better characterization, from memory, was that they don't bother with the ultra-rich because it's difficult to win. 200k-1M is probably the danger zone.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  And if someone gets charged it's the company which ends up paying a relatively small fine, since companies are people but we cannot send them to prison.
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    > but we cannot send them to prison. I think this belief is the problem. At the very least, a company has representatives; if it was to go to jail for a crime, then the C-suite or board could go in its place. A reasonable risk and form of accountability for the high rewards they already get. But I think it's fair to take it a step further: imprison the company. That is, apply any effects you would apply to a prisoner to that corporation. Lack of communication or direct control of assets and funds for the equivalent period of time for a start. Would that be existential, if not company ruining for any large length of time? Sure, just as it is for the average citizen. They'll lose many of the things they own, their jobs and livelihood and sometimes much more with any large prison sentence. Their loved ones and dependants' and acquaintances' lives are dramatically affected. So too can it be made the same for a company. The limit of limited liability should change with scale.
- adventured 6y ago
  They should all be in prison, they're criminals. And this is likely just the lighter stuff, this is what they're getting caught doing that can be easily tied back back to them directly. Your high doubt is warranted, absolutely nothing will happen to the likes of Sandberg & Co., they're literally protected, representing the ultimate privileged class. Absolutely nobody will dare go near them. You also won't see the hundred billionaires Sergey Brin & Larry Page getting pulled in by the Feds and questioned over the various criminal activities at Google during their reign. They ran away, fled before the curtain came down, specifically to evade the risk of their actions coming back on them as the Feds & states start turning Google inside out and the scrutiny gets intense. It was left for Pichai to deal with.
- dls2016 6y ago
  Don’t worry... She will be pulled over, peppered sprayed and held 3 months without a hearing.
mettamage 6y ago
So can someone with some knowledge about Google’s and Facebook’s past give an idea on how legally and morally good/bad this is compared to previous things they did? It seems really bad, to the point that Black Mirror-esque things are simply a decade away. With that said, I don’t know enough to draw that conclusion.
- prepend 6y ago
  Seems like Google’s internal units were bidding up ad prices. Since no one can see that but Google, ad buyers didn’t know they were paying higher prices. It could just be stupidity. Or bad policy. Or it could be systematic to maximize their as sales. Google’s not stupid, so them allowing it means they were aware and will able to easily explain why it’s not that big of a deal. It’s like if eBay sellers had their subsidiaries bidding up prices on their items. And not disclosing. Maybe there’s a good reason, probably just sneaky greed.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    Shill bidding is illegal in auctions. They've represented these ad markets as auctions, but it seems like they aren't. You're bidding against some machine designed to make you pay more. Can anyone offer a legit explanation.
    - URSpider94 6y ago
      One possibility: Google creates a fully independent subsidiary that bids on AdSense auctions with a goal of turning a profit by reselling the slots they buy. This might make sense if Google sees large inefficiencies in the ad market that are being taken advantage of by third party resellers, at the expense of their customers. It’s not a great look, but it could be done in a way that is aboveboard from a legal standpoint.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        That was the idea, wasn't it? Only they didn't make it independent, but gave it access to data that they didn't give to external bidders, because it would be less efficient (read: less profitable) if it had to act on public information.
srswtf123 6y ago
Every name that signed that document ought to be criminally charged, though like other commenters, I find it unlikely. TANJ.
gundmc 6y ago
Discussed 12 hours ago with 40+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767088
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wpietri 6y ago
Ooh, this is a great point: "there is reason to believe that the further the government is willing to go in its statutory definition of publicity the greater likelihood is there that it may be excused from the necessity of exercising direct administrative control." -- Henry Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns should be public, just like the way 990 forms from nonprofits are. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
- ajcp 6y ago
  And publicity is a known remedy for social and industrial diseases.
- clairity 6y ago
  yes, power wants to act surreptitiously because that minimizes both reputational damage and potential resistance, and transparency is a natural counter to that. i'm a strong proponent that transparency should increase superlinearly with power, which is something that our framers (in the US) had approximated, but never made particularly explicit. the average individual has a substantial right to privacy, basically having much autonomy to control information disseminated about themselves. on the other end, the average multinational conglomerate should have basically no privacy, for the company itself, its owners, and its management, as well as its political & commercial transactions. of course you'd have to be careful of the privacy rights of customers and suppliers (who'd also have varying transparency levels for themselves), but those could be anonymized. the neat aspect of that is that only larger entities would tend to be susceptible to being deanonymized through transaction pattern analysis, which is fine, since larger entities require more transparency anyway. in between are powerful individuals (full politicoeconomic transparency required) and small businesses (little transparency required).
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. For me, right to privacy declines with impact to others. What you're doing alone in your house? Don't care. Between consenting adults? I almost don't care, except when public health matters (e.g., STDs, or COVID contact tracing). but the more we move toward public impact, the more I think there's a public right to know. Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. Me lending my brother some money is reasonably seen as private. Me giving the same amount of money to a legislator as a bribe is something I might want to keep secret, but given the public impact, can't really be called private.
ma2rten 6y ago
I wouldn't take what someone says on substack at face value. Does anyone know if the unredacted document is available somewhere?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Matt Stoller is an expert in the field of antitrust, feel free to look him up.
lordnacho 6y ago
A position I've come to via free markets is public information. If you look at economic inefficiency, a lot of models depend on some kind of information problem, eg the famous lemon cars. Consequently, I think far more of how society works should be made public: - Actual incomes from various sources. Maybe anonymize it, but I've looked up my Norwegian friends' incomes and it hasn't caused a revolution or an epidemic of kidnappings yet. X person is a doctor, he needs a 10 year degree to do that, he get paid £120k, he gets this much pension, these are his working hours. Again, as you grow up you find out some of this but it's very not easy to find, especially when you're deciding. - Actual business models. "We provide a search engine, where we dynamically auction off advertising space, it makes x amount of money, and we thin y and z are critical to our profitability. Here's book about how it works." To some degree we know this about certain large businesses, but apart from the huge firms whose models have Ben Thompson writing about them, it's not actually that easy. It should be easy for everyone who's graduated high school to find out how the largest 10k firms in the country operate, so that people can think about how to improve things. - Actual business models, part 2. "We make x millions from y thousand widgets, which we sell to these people. Our suppliers are these firms, and we paid this much to them." Which again is one of those things where you can say "Google pays Apple to be default" but I also want to know if there's some other relationship that maybe I could get my company into. Or it may be that there's some social negative such as monopoly that we want to know sooner rather than later. - A who-owns-what database that doesn't have anonymizing entities in it. How will we know how society works if we don't have this? There's no way to know who has an interest in what without this. Again, you can say "kidnappings" but there's got to be some middle ground here. It's also a bit strange for society's major legal invention, property law, to work in favor of people when they ask for it, but the rest of the time society doesn't know who it is protecting. I'm no expert but you'd think a sane system would say "so-and-so owns this land, and in exchange for a bit of tax we'll make sure they can use it as they see fit". - Government needs to be transparent. People already believe this, it's just quite hard and boring to get done. But for instance David Cameron trying to lobby his old mates, it's a great thing that we can see it. As for this specific article, the interesting thing is that if ads were traded on a security market, a whole can of worms would be opened. We discovered a long time ago that it's bad to favor certain participants, so some stringent rules were put in place regarding fairness. But if I make a market for some other thing and behave the same way, it's not nearly as serious. I mean sure maybe they'll get done for this, but will it be proportional to the harm? Write to me when they're broken up, as the LSE would be if they made a principal business that front-runs the customers.
stefan_ 6y ago
This has the redacted document: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1381057389265321989 https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1381057389265321989 So you can see they redact "Bernanke" as in "Project Bernanke". Why? What possible trade secret is there involved in naming something after a guy that never worked for you? What kind of judge acquiesces to this bullshit? Where is Alsup to tell these clowns to no more redactions?
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Because the name "Bernanke" sounds like one is thumbing their nose at the central bank. Merely not a good look!
- hnburnsy 6y ago
  Search Bernake Helicopter Money, so it could imply that Google thinks this project is so profitable that money will be falling from the sky or maybe Google thinks it is a license to print money, like the the 'Fed and the money printers go brrrrrrrr' meme.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    This is a very small niche meme, and most of the "money printers go brrr" stuff is meme-ing post March 2020, when people didn't understand why the markets didn't go down. Certainly, it's a reference to central banking, I doubt it is to this meme.
    - 0xDEEPFAC 6y ago
      When Bernanke made the speech in 2016 where he invented the idea of a helicopter dropping money it was pretty much instantly a meme... everyone in the finance community knew about it because of how ridicules it sounded
      - randallsquared 6y ago
        The real heyday of this was early 2000s, after Bernanke used it in a speech the first time. Maybe he mentioned it again in 2016?
raverbashing 6y ago
Humm remember when Google's confidential commercial information about Android "accidentally" leaked most likely through the opposing council that time https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-leaked-android-numbers-put-235748225.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-leaked-android-numbers...
forgingahead 6y ago
WSJ article on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
I know many like this sort of article, but I lost interest at "Henry Adams, one of the most important thinkers in the 19th century", because it promises that the article will blather on with philosophical arguments for a long time before actually revealing its point (and thus before showing whether it is worth to spend any time on it).
- andybak 6y ago
  It was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to the point. I only know this because after reading the meat of the article and seeing your comment I went back to check. I had noticed the waffle the first time around because I'd skim read until I got to the relevant part.
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    > t was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to the point. Too much.
    - andybak 6y ago
      Not if you can skim read.
- rhencke 6y ago
  Except.. it didn't blather on at all, and got right to the point.
- ErikVandeWater 6y ago
  I think this heuristic is good, but specifically for identifying bad writing. You, me, and almost everyone here wants a straightforward account of what happened. The opening sentence is tone-deaf to what the readers want to learn. Also, the phrase "one of the most" is almost always indicative of poor writing, even if it is far better than using a superlative.
- cletus 6y ago
  Similarly, I lost interest when I clicked a link to another of the author's posts talking about the FTC declining to sue Google in 2012 and it treated the claims of Yelp as gospel for proof of Google's anticompetitive behaviour. Yelp like to paint Google as the bogeyman because it distracts from the fact that Yelp hasn't changed in a decade and the product, well, sucks. The core claim here seems to be that Google is giving itself preferential pricing on impressions. Maybe that's.true? It's not clear to me what the effect of that is. I would've liked more detail about that and less grandstanding on the evils of Google, honestly.
williesleg 6y ago
Hacker news!
perl4ever 6y ago
(2010) "...during the five minutes it took to draft and send the email, Google’s Gmail email system automatically saved eight “snapshots” of the email and put the copies into the author’s draft email folder. No action was required by the author. It was all done by the auto-save. When Google learned that it had inadvertently produced draft versions of the email to Oracle, it requested that Oracle return all copies. Oracle complied, but filed a motion to compel production of the draft and final versions of the email. Oracle successfully convinced the district court that the email was not protected by any privilege, and the court ordered the production of all versions of the email. Google sought a writ of mandamus to have the district court’s ruling overturned, but the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied the writ." https://www.millercanfield.com/media/article/200378_MCNewsletter_E-Discovery_7.19.12.pdf https://www.millercanfield.com/media/article/200378_MCNewsle...
lupire 6y ago
The auction part of this sounds like what people say rock bands and Nvidia should do: raise prices to make supply match demand and cut scalpers out of the loop. BTW, the OP is a copyright-dodging paywall-bypassing rehash of a WSJ article https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...
- Terretta 6y ago
  From WSJ: “Google acknowledged in its responses that it had agreed to make ‘commercially reasonable efforts’ to ensure that Facebook was able to identify 80% of mobile users and 60% of desktop users, excluding users of Apple’s Safari web browser, in ad auctions.”
kodah 6y ago
> The court system is supposed to be a public accounting I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case public is a good thing. The public accountability should likely be based on judges (the participants) and whistleblowers with a solid burden of proof threshold. Court cases do need to stay private in my mind.
- lakecresva 6y ago
  > I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case public is a good thing. Well for one, the US has a common law legal system, so it's entirely dependent on the public availability of court cases. In terms of fairness, I think the current status quo is (in this limited respect) very reasonable; you're entitled to absolutely iron-clad privacy in the interactions which you pay for, which are your interactions with your attorney. When you start making use of public funds by bringing your dispute to the courts, the public has a right to know what it's money is being spent on and it has a right to know what's going on in the community. The vast majority of legal disputes are settled in state district courts, which are local in scope. I also don't think privacy mixes well with the degree to which the judiciary is uniquely unaccountable, though this is admittedly less and less relevant as time goes on since basically nobody in government is accountable for anything at this point.
  - kodah 6y ago
    I'm still not convinced accountability means that the public gets full view of everything. There's probably other ways to ensure that the public gets to know their money is not wasted without hearing and seeing every little detail.
goldforever 6y ago
Only idiots believe this was accidental!
bawolff 6y ago
Why are they going on about tax returns? Doesnt seem like that's related to what was leaked.
EastSmith 6y ago
Google needs to be split in 4. Adsense, Adwords, Chrome and Android. Thank you.
- kevdragon6 6y ago
  search?
WCityMike 6y ago
I don't know for sure this happened, but the adjective "properly" in "properly redacted" makes me wonder if they did black highlight, or drew black boxes over the text, instead of using a PDF editor's redaction feature. Only the latter truly works.
0goel0 6y ago
OT: I sub to Matt Stoller but weirdly didn't receive this newsletter. Checked spam, nothing. Was there maybe a substack outage?
pasttense01 6y ago
A comment in the article by Sam Iam says: "Think how weird it would be if the cosmetologists trade org suddenly started requiring people to get a BA in whatever, as the ABA does, before they could go to a barber training program and had all 50 states make that the law in order to get a license" Well actually they go to schools of cosmetology, but note this California training requirement: "According to the state of California, students must complete at least 1600 hours of training in an accredited program to start their journey of becoming a licensed cosmetologist." https://www.tspasanjose.com/how-to-become-a-cosmetologist-in-california/ https://www.tspasanjose.com/how-to-become-a-cosmetologist-in... Conversely how much traning do you think is required to become an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in California? "California EMT programs are at least 160 hours and include at least 136 hours of didactic training and at least 24 hours of clinical training. The individual must have 10 patient contacts." https://www.healthcarepathway.com/become-an-emt/california-emt/ https://www.healthcarepathway.com/become-an-emt/california-e... Yes, it takes 10 times as much training to become a cosmetologist as it does to become an EMT in California. Anyone else think this is totally crazy?
- aynawn 6y ago
  I'm unsure but it does make me wonder. Perhaps there are fewer EMTs signing up than cosmotologists? Or perhaps the number of practice hours to e.g. create the perfect braid is lower than the number of practice hours to e.g. apply narcan? Or perhaps the effectiveness of the school education for one profession is more closely related to what you will experience in the real world, thereby requiring fewer hours of on-the-job training?

430 points by PretzelFisch 6y ago

So will there be criminal charges brought. I highly doubt it. That is typically the problem, a normal person gets the book thrown at them (even if they e.g. commit a crime accidentally), while nobody goes after the big guys because it is deemed to be too expensive or some other reason.

bendergarcia 6y ago
It’s sad, even the place that is supposed to be fair isn’t due to money. Money rules too many of America’s systems. But I have a feeling that money will always find a way to be influential.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Money is just a proxy for power. Power is synonymous with influence.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    There are plenty of influential broke people. Just look at YouTube.
    - albatruss 6y ago
      Exactly. That's why money is a proxy, not equivalent to power.
      - bendergarcia 6y ago
        A YouTuber cant use their likes to get the best lawyer can they? Even if they can (promos), it still means the legal system is unfair. The ones who benefit the system the most benefit from it.
        throwaway3699 6y ago
        Influencers can easily raise hundreds of thousands to fight legal cases if they have an audience that cares about their cause. Edit: s/YouTubers/Influencers
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - luckylion 6y ago
      And they can turn that influence into money very quickly. They might lose some of it when they cash in (or sell out), but it's pretty convertable.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        And the conversion rate is good at quantifying how much actual influence a person has. Which may be less than they think. How much influence a typical YouTuber with 10k subscribers have? Very little, actually - they can affect audience's thinking in a limited domain, or get them to buy some stuff to a limited degree. All restricted to how much a cohort of volunteers cares about what their entertainers tell them. Contrast that with a person wielding a $100. They can literally get someone to do almost anything for them for a couple of hours. Or, in general, they can exchange it for $100 worth of goods and services provided by an industrial civilization. That's what hard influence looks like.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > even the place that is supposed to be fair isn’t due to money What place is that?
  - bendergarcia 6y ago
    The legal system (The court room)
busterarm 6y ago
That's exactly it. Rich people have the resources to fight for longer than you will hold your office. There's a really eye opening report 2 years ago from Charles Rettig, commissioner of the IRS, where he openly states that his agency focuses audits on poorer people, because they have less resources to fight and are more likely to just pay up and move on. Most of the audit resources are targeted at people claiming the earned income tax credit.
- adventured 6y ago
  Edit: I provided actual data - facts - straight from the IRS. If you're going to downvote, I dare you to bring something to the table to counter reality (good luck). > where he openly states that his agency focuses audits on poorer people As incomes rise, audit % rates rise. The IRS does not focus a large share of its energy on poorer people. The people earning under $50,000 per year have a very low audit rate, and that's straight from the IRS data. Once your income climbs over $200,000 your audit rate begins to skyrocket. In terms of volume, 60% of all filers are at $50,000 or lower, so obviously even at a low % of audits they're still going to have a lot of audits. The IRS does audit people filing as having no income at a relatively high rate, because that category frequently attempts to use incorrect deductions to try to hide income. The rate of fraud is very high in that category. Here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2017ntf-irsauditstriggers.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2017ntf-irsauditstriggers.pd... "The majority of audited returns are for taxpayers who earn $500,000 a year or more, and most of them had incomes of over $1 million. These are the only income ranges that were subject to more than a 1% chance of an audit in 2018. " -- [note: the $500k+ group is the majority of audited returns despite the fact that they're a tiny share of all returns, which tells you how low the audit rate is for the poorer categories.] "According to IRS statistics, you’re safest if you report income in the neighborhood of $25,000 to $200,000. These taxpayers were audited the least in 2016." https://www.thebalance.com/top-audit-triggers-that-catch-irs-attention-4153034 https://www.thebalance.com/top-audit-triggers-that-catch-irs...
  - refenestrator 6y ago
    A better characterization, from memory, was that they don't bother with the ultra-rich because it's difficult to win. 200k-1M is probably the danger zone.
ajmurmann 6y ago
And if someone gets charged it's the company which ends up paying a relatively small fine, since companies are people but we cannot send them to prison.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  > but we cannot send them to prison. I think this belief is the problem. At the very least, a company has representatives; if it was to go to jail for a crime, then the C-suite or board could go in its place. A reasonable risk and form of accountability for the high rewards they already get. But I think it's fair to take it a step further: imprison the company. That is, apply any effects you would apply to a prisoner to that corporation. Lack of communication or direct control of assets and funds for the equivalent period of time for a start. Would that be existential, if not company ruining for any large length of time? Sure, just as it is for the average citizen. They'll lose many of the things they own, their jobs and livelihood and sometimes much more with any large prison sentence. Their loved ones and dependants' and acquaintances' lives are dramatically affected. So too can it be made the same for a company. The limit of limited liability should change with scale.
adventured 6y ago
They should all be in prison, they're criminals. And this is likely just the lighter stuff, this is what they're getting caught doing that can be easily tied back back to them directly. Your high doubt is warranted, absolutely nothing will happen to the likes of Sandberg & Co., they're literally protected, representing the ultimate privileged class. Absolutely nobody will dare go near them. You also won't see the hundred billionaires Sergey Brin & Larry Page getting pulled in by the Feds and questioned over the various criminal activities at Google during their reign. They ran away, fled before the curtain came down, specifically to evade the risk of their actions coming back on them as the Feds & states start turning Google inside out and the scrutiny gets intense. It was left for Pichai to deal with.
dls2016 6y ago
Don’t worry... She will be pulled over, peppered sprayed and held 3 months without a hearing.

mettamage 6y ago

So can someone with some knowledge about Google’s and Facebook’s past give an idea on how legally and morally good/bad this is compared to previous things they did? It seems really bad, to the point that Black Mirror-esque things are simply a decade away. With that said, I don’t know enough to draw that conclusion.

prepend 6y ago
Seems like Google’s internal units were bidding up ad prices. Since no one can see that but Google, ad buyers didn’t know they were paying higher prices. It could just be stupidity. Or bad policy. Or it could be systematic to maximize their as sales. Google’s not stupid, so them allowing it means they were aware and will able to easily explain why it’s not that big of a deal. It’s like if eBay sellers had their subsidiaries bidding up prices on their items. And not disclosing. Maybe there’s a good reason, probably just sneaky greed.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  Shill bidding is illegal in auctions. They've represented these ad markets as auctions, but it seems like they aren't. You're bidding against some machine designed to make you pay more. Can anyone offer a legit explanation.
  - URSpider94 6y ago
    One possibility: Google creates a fully independent subsidiary that bids on AdSense auctions with a goal of turning a profit by reselling the slots they buy. This might make sense if Google sees large inefficiencies in the ad market that are being taken advantage of by third party resellers, at the expense of their customers. It’s not a great look, but it could be done in a way that is aboveboard from a legal standpoint.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      That was the idea, wasn't it? Only they didn't make it independent, but gave it access to data that they didn't give to external bidders, because it would be less efficient (read: less profitable) if it had to act on public information.

srswtf123 6y ago

Every name that signed that document ought to be criminally charged, though like other commenters, I find it unlikely. TANJ.

gundmc 6y ago

Discussed 12 hours ago with 40+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767088

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

wpietri 6y ago

Ooh, this is a great point: "there is reason to believe that the further the government is willing to go in its statutory definition of publicity the greater likelihood is there that it may be excused from the necessity of exercising direct administrative control." -- Henry Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns should be public, just like the way 990 forms from nonprofits are. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

ajcp 6y ago
And publicity is a known remedy for social and industrial diseases.
clairity 6y ago
yes, power wants to act surreptitiously because that minimizes both reputational damage and potential resistance, and transparency is a natural counter to that. i'm a strong proponent that transparency should increase superlinearly with power, which is something that our framers (in the US) had approximated, but never made particularly explicit. the average individual has a substantial right to privacy, basically having much autonomy to control information disseminated about themselves. on the other end, the average multinational conglomerate should have basically no privacy, for the company itself, its owners, and its management, as well as its political & commercial transactions. of course you'd have to be careful of the privacy rights of customers and suppliers (who'd also have varying transparency levels for themselves), but those could be anonymized. the neat aspect of that is that only larger entities would tend to be susceptible to being deanonymized through transaction pattern analysis, which is fine, since larger entities require more transparency anyway. in between are powerful individuals (full politicoeconomic transparency required) and small businesses (little transparency required).
- wpietri 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. For me, right to privacy declines with impact to others. What you're doing alone in your house? Don't care. Between consenting adults? I almost don't care, except when public health matters (e.g., STDs, or COVID contact tracing). but the more we move toward public impact, the more I think there's a public right to know. Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. Me lending my brother some money is reasonably seen as private. Me giving the same amount of money to a legislator as a bribe is something I might want to keep secret, but given the public impact, can't really be called private.

ma2rten 6y ago

I wouldn't take what someone says on substack at face value. Does anyone know if the unredacted document is available somewhere?

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Matt Stoller is an expert in the field of antitrust, feel free to look him up.

lordnacho 6y ago

A position I've come to via free markets is public information. If you look at economic inefficiency, a lot of models depend on some kind of information problem, eg the famous lemon cars. Consequently, I think far more of how society works should be made public: - Actual incomes from various sources. Maybe anonymize it, but I've looked up my Norwegian friends' incomes and it hasn't caused a revolution or an epidemic of kidnappings yet. X person is a doctor, he needs a 10 year degree to do that, he get paid £120k, he gets this much pension, these are his working hours. Again, as you grow up you find out some of this but it's very not easy to find, especially when you're deciding. - Actual business models. "We provide a search engine, where we dynamically auction off advertising space, it makes x amount of money, and we thin y and z are critical to our profitability. Here's book about how it works." To some degree we know this about certain large businesses, but apart from the huge firms whose models have Ben Thompson writing about them, it's not actually that easy. It should be easy for everyone who's graduated high school to find out how the largest 10k firms in the country operate, so that people can think about how to improve things. - Actual business models, part 2. "We make x millions from y thousand widgets, which we sell to these people. Our suppliers are these firms, and we paid this much to them." Which again is one of those things where you can say "Google pays Apple to be default" but I also want to know if there's some other relationship that maybe I could get my company into. Or it may be that there's some social negative such as monopoly that we want to know sooner rather than later. - A who-owns-what database that doesn't have anonymizing entities in it. How will we know how society works if we don't have this? There's no way to know who has an interest in what without this. Again, you can say "kidnappings" but there's got to be some middle ground here. It's also a bit strange for society's major legal invention, property law, to work in favor of people when they ask for it, but the rest of the time society doesn't know who it is protecting. I'm no expert but you'd think a sane system would say "so-and-so owns this land, and in exchange for a bit of tax we'll make sure they can use it as they see fit". - Government needs to be transparent. People already believe this, it's just quite hard and boring to get done. But for instance David Cameron trying to lobby his old mates, it's a great thing that we can see it. As for this specific article, the interesting thing is that if ads were traded on a security market, a whole can of worms would be opened. We discovered a long time ago that it's bad to favor certain participants, so some stringent rules were put in place regarding fairness. But if I make a market for some other thing and behave the same way, it's not nearly as serious. I mean sure maybe they'll get done for this, but will it be proportional to the harm? Write to me when they're broken up, as the LSE would be if they made a principal business that front-runs the customers.

stefan_ 6y ago

This has the redacted document: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1381057389265321989 https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1381057389265321989 So you can see they redact "Bernanke" as in "Project Bernanke". Why? What possible trade secret is there involved in naming something after a guy that never worked for you? What kind of judge acquiesces to this bullshit? Where is Alsup to tell these clowns to no more redactions?

Ericson2314 6y ago
Because the name "Bernanke" sounds like one is thumbing their nose at the central bank. Merely not a good look!
hnburnsy 6y ago
Search Bernake Helicopter Money, so it could imply that Google thinks this project is so profitable that money will be falling from the sky or maybe Google thinks it is a license to print money, like the the 'Fed and the money printers go brrrrrrrr' meme.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  This is a very small niche meme, and most of the "money printers go brrr" stuff is meme-ing post March 2020, when people didn't understand why the markets didn't go down. Certainly, it's a reference to central banking, I doubt it is to this meme.
  - 0xDEEPFAC 6y ago
    When Bernanke made the speech in 2016 where he invented the idea of a helicopter dropping money it was pretty much instantly a meme... everyone in the finance community knew about it because of how ridicules it sounded
    - randallsquared 6y ago
      The real heyday of this was early 2000s, after Bernanke used it in a speech the first time. Maybe he mentioned it again in 2016?

raverbashing 6y ago

Humm remember when Google's confidential commercial information about Android "accidentally" leaked most likely through the opposing council that time https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-leaked-android-numbers-put-235748225.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-leaked-android-numbers...

forgingahead 6y ago

WSJ article on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

I know many like this sort of article, but I lost interest at "Henry Adams, one of the most important thinkers in the 19th century", because it promises that the article will blather on with philosophical arguments for a long time before actually revealing its point (and thus before showing whether it is worth to spend any time on it).

andybak 6y ago
It was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to the point. I only know this because after reading the meat of the article and seeing your comment I went back to check. I had noticed the waffle the first time around because I'd skim read until I got to the relevant part.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  > t was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to the point. Too much.
  - andybak 6y ago
    Not if you can skim read.
rhencke 6y ago
Except.. it didn't blather on at all, and got right to the point.
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
I think this heuristic is good, but specifically for identifying bad writing. You, me, and almost everyone here wants a straightforward account of what happened. The opening sentence is tone-deaf to what the readers want to learn. Also, the phrase "one of the most" is almost always indicative of poor writing, even if it is far better than using a superlative.
cletus 6y ago
Similarly, I lost interest when I clicked a link to another of the author's posts talking about the FTC declining to sue Google in 2012 and it treated the claims of Yelp as gospel for proof of Google's anticompetitive behaviour. Yelp like to paint Google as the bogeyman because it distracts from the fact that Yelp hasn't changed in a decade and the product, well, sucks. The core claim here seems to be that Google is giving itself preferential pricing on impressions. Maybe that's.true? It's not clear to me what the effect of that is. I would've liked more detail about that and less grandstanding on the evils of Google, honestly.

williesleg 6y ago

Hacker news!

perl4ever 6y ago

(2010) "...during the five minutes it took to draft and send the email, Google’s Gmail email system automatically saved eight “snapshots” of the email and put the copies into the author’s draft email folder. No action was required by the author. It was all done by the auto-save. When Google learned that it had inadvertently produced draft versions of the email to Oracle, it requested that Oracle return all copies. Oracle complied, but filed a motion to compel production of the draft and final versions of the email. Oracle successfully convinced the district court that the email was not protected by any privilege, and the court ordered the production of all versions of the email. Google sought a writ of mandamus to have the district court’s ruling overturned, but the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied the writ." https://www.millercanfield.com/media/article/200378_MCNewsletter_E-Discovery_7.19.12.pdf https://www.millercanfield.com/media/article/200378_MCNewsle...

lupire 6y ago

The auction part of this sounds like what people say rock bands and Nvidia should do: raise prices to make supply match demand and cut scalpers out of the loop. BTW, the OP is a copyright-dodging paywall-bypassing rehash of a WSJ article https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...

Terretta 6y ago
From WSJ: “Google acknowledged in its responses that it had agreed to make ‘commercially reasonable efforts’ to ensure that Facebook was able to identify 80% of mobile users and 60% of desktop users, excluding users of Apple’s Safari web browser, in ad auctions.”

kodah 6y ago

> The court system is supposed to be a public accounting I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case public is a good thing. The public accountability should likely be based on judges (the participants) and whistleblowers with a solid burden of proof threshold. Court cases do need to stay private in my mind.

lakecresva 6y ago
> I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case public is a good thing. Well for one, the US has a common law legal system, so it's entirely dependent on the public availability of court cases. In terms of fairness, I think the current status quo is (in this limited respect) very reasonable; you're entitled to absolutely iron-clad privacy in the interactions which you pay for, which are your interactions with your attorney. When you start making use of public funds by bringing your dispute to the courts, the public has a right to know what it's money is being spent on and it has a right to know what's going on in the community. The vast majority of legal disputes are settled in state district courts, which are local in scope. I also don't think privacy mixes well with the degree to which the judiciary is uniquely unaccountable, though this is admittedly less and less relevant as time goes on since basically nobody in government is accountable for anything at this point.
- kodah 6y ago
  I'm still not convinced accountability means that the public gets full view of everything. There's probably other ways to ensure that the public gets to know their money is not wasted without hearing and seeing every little detail.

goldforever 6y ago

Only idiots believe this was accidental!

bawolff 6y ago

Why are they going on about tax returns? Doesnt seem like that's related to what was leaked.

EastSmith 6y ago

Google needs to be split in 4. Adsense, Adwords, Chrome and Android. Thank you.

kevdragon6 6y ago
search?

WCityMike 6y ago

I don't know for sure this happened, but the adjective "properly" in "properly redacted" makes me wonder if they did black highlight, or drew black boxes over the text, instead of using a PDF editor's redaction feature. Only the latter truly works.

0goel0 6y ago

OT: I sub to Matt Stoller but weirdly didn't receive this newsletter. Checked spam, nothing. Was there maybe a substack outage?

pasttense01 6y ago

A comment in the article by Sam Iam says: "Think how weird it would be if the cosmetologists trade org suddenly started requiring people to get a BA in whatever, as the ABA does, before they could go to a barber training program and had all 50 states make that the law in order to get a license" Well actually they go to schools of cosmetology, but note this California training requirement: "According to the state of California, students must complete at least 1600 hours of training in an accredited program to start their journey of becoming a licensed cosmetologist." https://www.tspasanjose.com/how-to-become-a-cosmetologist-in-california/ https://www.tspasanjose.com/how-to-become-a-cosmetologist-in... Conversely how much traning do you think is required to become an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in California? "California EMT programs are at least 160 hours and include at least 136 hours of didactic training and at least 24 hours of clinical training. The individual must have 10 patient contacts." https://www.healthcarepathway.com/become-an-emt/california-emt/ https://www.healthcarepathway.com/become-an-emt/california-e... Yes, it takes 10 times as much training to become a cosmetologist as it does to become an EMT in California. Anyone else think this is totally crazy?

aynawn 6y ago
I'm unsure but it does make me wonder. Perhaps there are fewer EMTs signing up than cosmotologists? Or perhaps the number of practice hours to e.g. create the perfect braid is lower than the number of practice hours to e.g. apply narcan? Or perhaps the effectiveness of the school education for one profession is more closely related to what you will experience in the real world, thereby requiring fewer hours of on-the-job training?