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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

954 points by cyrusshepard 5y ago

trhway 5y 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.
bickeringyokel 5y 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.
creddit 5y ago
It's hilarious to me that someone thinks this is about controlling thought and not a defensive legal maneuver.
- ehsankia 5y 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 5y 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?
  - creddit 5y ago
    Totally. This whole thing is just wild to me.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  I mean it can easily be both at the same time.
- minism 5y ago
  Right. This seems to be needlessly overcomplicating/obfuscating whats going on.
jgalt212 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- kens 5y 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.
ekianjo 5y 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.
- _nalply 5y ago
  Perhaps you could view Googlespeak as a side-effect of the legal protection.
- playpause 5y ago
  Unclear how any of this means it’s not Googlespeak.
  - altgoogler 5y ago
    It's not clear to you how standard business practices aren't some sort of Google-specific Orwellian new-speak?
    - beepbooptheory 5y ago
      Well I don't know about OP but, no, its not clear to me! Or at least, I don't know about the Orwell parallel precisely here, but this way of thinking/speaking is very weird to me, however much its "business as usual." Can't really critique it, but you can't tell me its not a weird view of the world!
    - playpause 5y ago
      Many people would consider that particular business practice a bit Orwellian, however standard. And it’s especially so when the business in question is a global megagiant that’s so deeply integrated into our lives. The comparison with Newspeak is just a blindingly obvious literary reference. Do you genuinely not see it? If so I urge you to read the article again and try to imagine you don’t work at Google.
NoblePublius 5y ago
I was expecting some analysis of what you tweeted to the Google people that was outside their vocabulary.
afterburner 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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_24 5y 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.
deathanatos 5y 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.)
- imhelpingu 5y ago
  I would encourage readers to compare this disingenuous top comment with the other disingenuous top comment. edit: And those of you trying to suppress that comparison with downmods can cry more.
  - moeris 5y ago
    Am I supposed to come away thinking they're both reasonable interpretations which accurately critique the main argument in this article? Because that's what I came away with. (At the moment, the other to comment is about how focusing on positive goals is a good business strategy, not just light-stepping on legal egg shells.)
    - imhelpingu 5y ago
      I pasted the current top comment for you since you seem to be having trouble finding it or reading it: >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. Hope this helps.
CryptoPunk 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Good: Google's mission is to sell more ads Bad: Google's mission is to organize the world's information
bertttles 5y ago
"Google’s Growing Antitrust Tsunami" - says it all!
hnbad 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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/ http://rohitg.in/2017/09/03/whowe/
inglor_cz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
ryankupyn 5y 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.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y 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 5y 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/antitrust_procedures_102_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/competition/publications/factsheets/ant...
hospadar 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    People who go to live in other countries are called expats, people coming to live in your country are called immigrants
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      It's a shame about the downvotes, because that's a perfect example of loaded language which imposes a conceptual frame for both speaker and listener. It's not an abstract point. It has very real consequences because it's supposed to - and does - trigger expected emotions and behaviours. PR consultants, politicians, lawyers, ad copy writers, and others who use rhetoric professionally use this kind of loading very deliberately.
snarf21 5y 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!”
- wombatmobile 5y 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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28219702/
- prox 5y 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.
SCUSKU 5y 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?
- Lammy 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
- Barrin92 5y 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
echelon 5y 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.
- shadowgovt 5y 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 5y 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".
skybrian 5y 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.
- eawoifjaiowepfj 5y 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.
- _nalply 5y 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.
- sa1 5y ago
  It might not be intended to limit thought, just to avoid liability, but does it limit thought anyway?
  - 5y ago
clipradiowallet 5y 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 5y ago
  > Or is that...unreasonable Yes. And I suppose that is what your downvoters mean too.
- mcrad 5y ago
  Okay so do shareholders of public companies encourage the management to commit fraud and deception?
- coldacid 5y 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.
nixpulvis 5y 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 5y 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 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.
dleslie 5y 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_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
- roenxi 5y 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.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    If the behaviour doesn't warrant prosecution then there would be no need for careful use of language to conceal it.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  Or the earlier example "Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences#Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sen...).
eunoia 5y 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...
- eunoia 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- grecy 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
bigcorp-slave 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
poof131 5y 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/1455663/welfare_standard_speech_-_cmr-wilson.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
- amelius 5y ago
  That font ...
  - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
    Times New Roman?
    - amelius 5y ago
      Yeah, looks like a Firefox rendering problem.
AlbertCory 5y 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 5y 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...
  - AlbertCory 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
ummonk 5y 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.
greatgib 5y 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!
- brandmeyer 5y 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).
benatkin 5y 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 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-traffic-open-web-every-year/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-sends-more...

954 points by cyrusshepard 5y 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.

bickeringyokel 5y 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.

creddit 5y ago

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

ehsankia 5y 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 5y 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?
- creddit 5y ago
  Totally. This whole thing is just wild to me.
throwaway2048 5y ago
I mean it can easily be both at the same time.
minism 5y ago
Right. This seems to be needlessly overcomplicating/obfuscating whats going on.

jgalt212 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

kens 5y 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.

ekianjo 5y 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.

_nalply 5y ago
Perhaps you could view Googlespeak as a side-effect of the legal protection.
playpause 5y ago
Unclear how any of this means it’s not Googlespeak.
- altgoogler 5y ago
  It's not clear to you how standard business practices aren't some sort of Google-specific Orwellian new-speak?
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    Well I don't know about OP but, no, its not clear to me! Or at least, I don't know about the Orwell parallel precisely here, but this way of thinking/speaking is very weird to me, however much its "business as usual." Can't really critique it, but you can't tell me its not a weird view of the world!
  - playpause 5y ago
    Many people would consider that particular business practice a bit Orwellian, however standard. And it’s especially so when the business in question is a global megagiant that’s so deeply integrated into our lives. The comparison with Newspeak is just a blindingly obvious literary reference. Do you genuinely not see it? If so I urge you to read the article again and try to imagine you don’t work at Google.

NoblePublius 5y ago

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

afterburner 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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_24 5y 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.

deathanatos 5y 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.)

imhelpingu 5y ago
I would encourage readers to compare this disingenuous top comment with the other disingenuous top comment. edit: And those of you trying to suppress that comparison with downmods can cry more.
- moeris 5y ago
  Am I supposed to come away thinking they're both reasonable interpretations which accurately critique the main argument in this article? Because that's what I came away with. (At the moment, the other to comment is about how focusing on positive goals is a good business strategy, not just light-stepping on legal egg shells.)
  - imhelpingu 5y ago
    I pasted the current top comment for you since you seem to be having trouble finding it or reading it: >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. Hope this helps.

CryptoPunk 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

Good: Google's mission is to sell more ads Bad: Google's mission is to organize the world's information

bertttles 5y ago

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

hnbad 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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/ http://rohitg.in/2017/09/03/whowe/

inglor_cz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

ryankupyn 5y 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.

WesolyKubeczek 5y 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 5y 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/antitrust_procedures_102_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/competition/publications/factsheets/ant...

hospadar 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  People who go to live in other countries are called expats, people coming to live in your country are called immigrants
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    It's a shame about the downvotes, because that's a perfect example of loaded language which imposes a conceptual frame for both speaker and listener. It's not an abstract point. It has very real consequences because it's supposed to - and does - trigger expected emotions and behaviours. PR consultants, politicians, lawyers, ad copy writers, and others who use rhetoric professionally use this kind of loading very deliberately.

snarf21 5y 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!”

wombatmobile 5y 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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28219702/
prox 5y 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.

SCUSKU 5y 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?

Lammy 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
Barrin92 5y 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

echelon 5y 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.

shadowgovt 5y 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 5y 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".

skybrian 5y 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.

eawoifjaiowepfj 5y 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.
_nalply 5y 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.
sa1 5y ago
It might not be intended to limit thought, just to avoid liability, but does it limit thought anyway?
- 5y ago

clipradiowallet 5y 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 5y ago
> Or is that...unreasonable Yes. And I suppose that is what your downvoters mean too.
mcrad 5y ago
Okay so do shareholders of public companies encourage the management to commit fraud and deception?
coldacid 5y 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.

nixpulvis 5y 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 5y 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 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.

dleslie 5y 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_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

roenxi 5y 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.
- dleslie 5y ago
  If the behaviour doesn't warrant prosecution then there would be no need for careful use of language to conceal it.
JadeNB 5y ago
Or the earlier example "Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences#Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sen...).

eunoia 5y 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...

eunoia 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

grecy 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

bigcorp-slave 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

poof131 5y 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/1455663/welfare_standard_speech_-_cmr-wilson.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...

amelius 5y ago
That font ...
- bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
  Times New Roman?
  - amelius 5y ago
    Yeah, looks like a Firefox rendering problem.

AlbertCory 5y 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 5y 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...
- AlbertCory 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

ummonk 5y 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.

greatgib 5y 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!

brandmeyer 5y 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).

benatkin 5y 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 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-traffic-open-web-every-year/ https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-sends-more...