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For things like this, Matt Levine is insightful: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/matt-levines-money-stuff-people-worry-about-the-basis-trade https

For things like this, Matt Levine is insightful: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/matt-levines-money-stuff-people-worry-about-the-basis-trade https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/matt-levines-mo... Summary is that not only can you not say things like "lock up" or "market share", you also can't tell employees not to say those things or you'll see headlines like the posted article and have the government claiming at trial that you're trying to hide evidence. This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair.

dekhn 3y ago
My favorite part is the core guidance Google always told us was: "how would you feel if an email wrote showed up negatively on the front page of the New York Times". I lost count of the number of times that Google execs (and senior directors) emails showed up on the front page of the Times after that; one time I opened the Times to see my own manager's email advising the android team that it was fine to reverse engineer Java code from Sun into Android.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  With the *really* sensitive stuff you aren’t even allowed to write a single thing down, everything is done verbally, totally off the books.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/7R3fqjCL4XY?si=0uOcKDgWZhuvlZbQ https://youtu.be/7R3fqjCL4XY?si=0uOcKDgWZhuvlZbQ (NSFW language warning)
    - recursivecaveat 3y ago
      I thought for sure this would be a link to the end of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly82nabRRYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly82nabRRYc
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
lazide 3y ago
“Anything you say can and will be used against you.” It’s not just a warning, it’s reality, as you’re seeing play out here. Legal opponents will use whatever they can get ahold of. At a certain scale, it’s guaranteed you’ll have legal opponents - often constantly! - no matter what you do. Though some courses of action will certainly result in more of them! The question is, is it better or worse than the alternative? And how likely is it to actually cause you harm? Because I’m pretty sure a bunch of emails saying “We’re going to crush x by locking up the market.” would be worse. We’ll see how this plays out though!
- AnonymousC123 3y ago
  I suspect in the future all employee education on law will have a lawyer present who marks the discussion as client attorney priviledged. It is weird that the legal system has developed where absolutely all communication except that which has lawyers can be discovered in court. Almost like a guild support it's members. But if that's the way it is so be it. Everything will now be feature more lawyers and education on law will be client attorney privileged.
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    IANAL but you don’t get attorney client privilege just by having a lawyer in the room. You actually have to be quite careful to make sure the privilege can be asserted.
    - checkyoursudo 3y ago
      I was a lawyer (still am, just don't practice anymore), and this is true. Not only that, but if you have the wrong people in the room, then you can lose what would otherwise have been attorney-client privilege.
      - belval 3y ago
        Not seeking legal advice, just curious. Where is the line drawn with regard to attorney-client privilege in corporation with various communication tools? I was once told by a lawyer that emails were privileged (assuming you are communicating with your corporate counsel) but Slack messages with the same person were not. Is this just a lack of precedent with Slack?
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> you also can't tell employees not to say those things You and I can’t. Our lawyers can. There shouldn’t be that many people at your firm who can make anticompetitive decisions. Ensure they meet 1:1 with corporate counsel to be advised on what the law is, and how the law responds to certain language. That’s not only kosher, it’s protected by privilege.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  based on the discovery from this and other cases, everyone at Google believed they were entitled to meet with legal counsel and that all conversations were privileged
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > everyone at Google believed they were entitled to meet with legal counsel and that all conversations were privileged It sounds like a lot of senior people at Google don’t understand how privilege works.
  - Cheezewheel 3y ago
    As someone who is ignorant of this matter, why aren't the conversations privileged? Is it because the lawyer's represent the company and not the individual personally?
    - sidewndr46 3y ago
      The way I had a lawyer relate this to me was along the lines of: I ask a lawyer about the legality of specific acts I am considering. This is privileged conversation. I send an email to someone else telling them to do something (which may be in violation of one or more laws). I copy legal counsel on the email and "request their input on their subject at hand". This is not privileged communication.
  - esrauch 3y ago
    I've been a swe at big cos for 10 years and I believe this because that's literally what the lawyers repeatedly informed me was the case. Every significant launch involves a moment where a senior engineer meets with legal counsel and explains the launch and counsel says if they see legal risks with the launch. It's also routine to meet with them early and discuss possible future directions or explain the business value in revisiting a standing policy to see if the benefit to risk is worth it or not. If you're saying that random engineers aren't actually entitled to meet with legal counsel and have a privileged conversation where they privately ask for directed legal advice, that would be surprising news to me.
UtopiaPunk 3y ago
What seems unfair? Government agencies are actively try to identify forming monopolies and stop them, or break them up. If a company doesn't want to face consequences for acting like a monopoly, the best way to do that is to not approach becoming a monopoly.
danaris 3y ago
Or—and hear me out here—you could just not conduct your business in such a way that you end up on trial for abusing a dominant market position. It's not like this is something that loads of companies have faced—this isn't the kind of situation where you can say "but the DoJ brings companies up on trial for this all the time, whether they've clearly got a dominant market position or not!" The rules are byzantine and complex, but the principle is simple: Compete fairly, rather than trying to eliminate your competition. If you do end up with a dominant market position, by whatever means, don't try to abuse it to keep others out of the market or small within the market. "But Wall Street" "But muh infinite growth" "But repeatedly-debunked-fiction about fiduciary duty to stockholders" No. You don't have to be a greedy, selfish, narcissistic asshole just to get by.
stefan_ 3y ago
Odd and unfair?! Companies are just an abstraction we invented purely to facilitate capitalism, a simple organizational unit in the market. If they try to monopolize and manipulate the market to defeat competition, there is no reason to keep them around.
- gipp 3y ago
  ? Their culpability on that count has nothing to do with whether this particular argument is a fair one or not. If you do something unfair to a guilty person it was still an unfair thing
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  Err, companies go back before the invention of capitalism. Ignoring government chartered companies (which date back to the earliest governments, and therefore served monarchical economic systems), the first common-stock company was the Dutch East India Company (sometimes known as VOC) and was founded under a mercantilist economic system. And the VOC was hard-core manipulative and monopolistic. If you want to claim that companies were invented to serve the rapacious profiteer, then all good--that's mostly true. But as a factual matter, they are not the invention of capitalism and long predate it.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  > Companies are just an abstraction we invented purely to facilitate capitalism, a simple organizational unit in the market. No. The earliest companies in various cultures go back more than a thousand years and they have emerged for a variety of reasons -- pooled risks and resources, family businesses needing to hire non-relatives, tradesmen needing to hand their businesses on to their apprentices, etc. Capitalism is actually pretty new. It's not much older as a practice than its definition. Kongo Gumi alone existed for more than a thousand years before capitalism became a meaningful economic model. The livery companies in the UK date back 600 years before the UK was a capitalist system. And we could still have various forms of companies in a non-capitalist system, which in turn does not automatically mean communism.
aaomidi 3y ago
> This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair. Legitimately a hilarious notion to be honest.
naikrovek 3y ago
I'll tell ya, having watched the MS antitrust stuff happen vs. this, Google has a hell of a lot more apologists participating in posts like this one than Microsoft had employees at the time. Google learned a lot from prior big antitrust cases, clearly.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  I work at Google and the comments like the one OP had is so deeply confusing to me? If the judicial system finds that there was monopolistic behavior, then they should deal with it. People apologizing that "oh poor companies have a hard time with words" are wild to me.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Having worked at MS post anti trust, we weren't allowed to say things like "murder the competition", but I just assumed that was because they didn't want us going to jail for attempted homicide when we were just using hyperbole.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    well, believe it or not, hyperbole can't put you in jail for long, of at all. 1st Amendment. if hate speech is protected (it is) then hyperbole is protected (it is). you weren't allowed to say those things because you needed to change your corporate culture. changing how you speak at work is very effective at that. Google somehow believe that if they also dodge the phrases of the past that they will escape the scrutiny of the past, implying that they think government regulators are stupid and won't be able to see what is really happening. Google have been very, very foolish in thinking in that way.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Wait. How is Microsoft banning phrases to change corporate culture but google banning phrases isn’t to change corporate culture? Or is google just consider evil in intent by default while Microsoft isn’t?
treis 3y ago
>you also can't tell employees not to say those things or you'll see headlines like the posted article and have the government claiming at trial that you're trying to hide evidence. This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair. The point is to not do anti-competitive things. Doing them and not talking about them isn't better than doing them and talking about them. Clearly it's worse because you know you're doing something wrong and trying to get away with it.
hotnfresh 3y ago
“Don’t say ‘murder’; say ‘liquidate’ or ‘take care of’” I mean, that sure looks like evidence to me, and not in an unfair way. Calling it unfair is like “how can you possibly expect me to not get in trouble if I can’t conspire to avoid getting caught breaking the law!”
tshaddox 3y ago
Is it really that odd? The point isn't that you can't say those things and you can't tell employees to not say those things. The point is that you can't do those things, and separately, you can't tell employees to not say those things. Your characteristic made it sound like the government's end goal is for the company to simply not say those things, in which case it would be silly for them to also not allow you to tell employees to not say them. But of course the government's end goal is for the company to not do those things, and separately, they don't want the company to instruct its employees to refrain from discussing those things because that indeed looks a lot like trying to hide evidence.
- summerlight 3y ago
  Yes, that's very odd. Because without such corporate policy being allowed, competitors can easily bribe some employees to loudly speak it out and use it as evidence of bad acts/intention. It's almost impossible to counter it as long as they're careful enough to hide such collusion.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Prickle 3y ago
    That claim seems incredibly unfair. That is just regular corporate espionage. The reverse is possible as well. What next? Governments are not allowed to police corpY because rival corpZ will violate the laws that corpY follows; thereby stealing marketshare?
    - summerlight 3y ago
      You're overreacting. Corporate should have a minimal defense against these kinds of attacks in the court. One defense is "Okay, we don't speak this in our company. We made it clear by policy and if someone does at least this is evidence that it's not our company-wide strategy". Of course, whether this claim is accepted or not is up to the court, but interpreting this as a part of evidence destruction is pretty "creative" and I see this as a signal of being a weak case.
timeagain 3y ago
“Unfair” only in that regardless of the words used, anti-competitive practices may be prosecuted as such. If you need to educate your employees not to sound like monopolists it may be too late.
tetrep 3y ago
> This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair. Why? It's not a crime in and of itself. You're also free to make sure all your banking transactions are <$10k, but that doesn't make you immune to being investigated for money laundering.
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  I was also under the impression this was true, but in fact structuring is its own crime, even if the money was obtained legally.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
senkora 3y ago
> you also can't tell employees not to say those things You can, but only in an regularly scheduled unrecorded meeting that is described euphemistically as “compliance training”.
happytiger 3y ago
Training employees to avoid terms that legally insinuate “market dominance” (aka, monopolies) is the smoking gun of someone trying to hide a monopoly though. How is that in any way unfair? Unfortunately that article is under lock and key login so forgive me if the comment is off point.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  I don't think it's unreasonable to fear that your employees will say something stupid that shows up in court even if you haven't done anything illegal.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    There is always a balance of risk between what appears in discovery and trial to be active management of risk, the original risk of monopolistic accusations and prosecution, and the risk of false accusation due to imprudent or unconscious behavior of employees and associates of the business, irrespective of legality. I’m simply saying the smoking gun of managers managing the risk needs to be seriously considered as a possible smoking gun and not simply dismissed because of its potential as a false indicator.
oceanplexian 3y ago
I worked at another FAANG and they did exactly the same thing. There were official docs saying not to say the word monopoly, or something to that effect (It's been a few years). It felt dirty, glad to see that I was right and no, there isn't some magic legal loophole of using special phraseology to imply things that are illegal.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I was a senior person at a company best remaining nameless that trained all new executives to never use the words “monopoly,” “fix prices,” “dictate prices,” despite the fact we had a required pricing schedule for retailers, bought back all excess inventory at cost to prevent a grey market, and dropped retailers that ran promotions. Their products were never on sale and accounted for 80% of retailers revenues, and they controlled 75% of their market segment. Whenever a new upstart brand came along they simply acquired them. Everyone sold their brands because it was known unless you were owned by this company you had no long term future in the market. These sorts of market controlling companies are weird to work for. On the one hand they have a certain excellence that keeps their market lock year over year. On the other there’s a strangulating incestuous monoculture that self perpetuates a view of brilliance. You see this internally at other companies with these locks - google for one, googlers, especially hey day googlers, walk out with an ego the size of their market share. I’ve scrupulously avoided working there despite many chances over the years because of the smugness - not that I couldn’t work with that environment, I’m afraid I would adopt it as well.
- ars 3y ago
  ResMed and Luxottica are like that. Luxottica is a straight up abusive monopoly - they actually sell the insurance that they themselves take! ResMed simply has better technology than others, and is a de-facto monopoly.
  - deepsun 3y ago
    Yes, but there's also a problem is customers really believe it's worth paying $300 for the simplest type of near-vision glasses in 2023. And they're ready to pay for that, so why not take their money?
    - Firmwarrior 3y ago
      It's so nuts that Facebook was able to put a computer and cameras into sunglasses without increasing the price Prescription glasses are basically just chunks of not-too-special plastic that you can buy online for $20 or less, but people refuse to believe that the whole industry is a scam when I try to tell them about it
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
The issue isn't the phrasing. It's the conspiring to violate antitrust law. If you do conspire to violate antitrust law, then telling people to hide the evidence is furthering that conspiracy. That's not unfair, it's a misunderstanding of what the illegal part is.
TX81Z 3y ago
It’s utterly uncontroversial to state that Google search has gone to shit in the last few years. Now, the question to ask is if Google wasn’t paying off other companies to make them the default would they have been more incentivized to make a better search experience? At this point I don’t get any better results from Google than DuckDuckGo/Bing. A few years ago Google was better, now they are increasingly useless and no better than competitors. If iOS users got a prompt to choose a search engine the first time they open Safari, and the order of choices was random, how many would even notice the results were different in any way?
- BitwiseFool 3y ago
  There are folks in my life who aren't comfortable with computers and either wouldn't know that changing the default search engine was even possible, or wouldn't feel comfortable with going into the settings because they would be afraid of breaking something.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    And Google has them hook line and sinker by virtue of paying off some competitors.
- eep_social 3y ago
  Kind of doesn’t sound like much of a monopoly if you’ve got two alternatives you know and are familiar with off the top.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    I think you’re missing the point about antitrust and competition. It’s about abusing your power to prevent potential competitors from competing on the merits. Paying to be a default means hardly anybody will ever see your competitors product. If everybody was able to easily see Google’s results vs competitors it’s likely they would try harder and wouldn’t have just spent all their effort on cramming more ads above the results.
yieldcrv 3y ago
and just because I used snapchat to message (which has ephemeral messaging by default, at least client side) doesnt mean I’m a hiding antitrust violations! or whatever procedurally generated idea you think I’m hiding just cocaine shipments.
gnicholas 3y ago
I remember when I was a corporate lawyer, it was common practice to search for emails that just said "call me" — an indication that there was something that they didn't want to put in writing. This wasn't a smoking gun, but it could help prove you were on the right track. Also, if you depose someone and ask them about a specific phone conversation they had, they're probably less likely to lie than if you just generally ask them if they ever talked about XYZ.
steveBK123 3y ago
Well put another way - It's one thing to tell your employees not to break the law. That's good! It's another thing to tell your employees not to use a bunch of words while doing their job which implicate the firm in breaking laws they've been accused of breaking. It's almost like an admission of guilt or attempt to obfuscate. From a bank/fund perspective - we get tons and tons of training about how we should not insider trade, money launder, etc. They have people who have gone to jail come give talks about how it's not worth it, it was the biggest mistake of their lives, etc. Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like "so hey don't use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..". It's stupid and hubristic. Just like the other stuff that came out of GOOG execs sending emails telling people not to put stuff in emails, lol. Cmon guys.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  That's certainly the legal theory that the DOJ is going to push. The counter argument that I'm sure Google will bring to the table is that (a) that advice was given in the context of helping engineers understand that legal definitions and vernacular definitions are different, and it is the nature of adversarial court systems that words they think they're using with one meeting can be taken out of context by an opponent in a court case, so think about what they are saying, and (b) all of the above is just facts and the government suppressing a corporation's right to state facts would be a clear and obvious violation of the First Amendment. But these are two legal arguments and it's hard to predict how the court will decide.
- Closi 3y ago
  Really good comparison! Imagine… “Rather than use words like ‘insider trading’ we should say ‘based on market research’”
- blindriver 3y ago
  > Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like "so hey don't use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..". Well, I have. At a large well known tech company I used to work for, we were told not to use terms like "killing our competitors", "smoking them", etc. or any words that implied we had any dominance or monopoly in our industry. We even had a "War Room" undergo a name change. The reason is exactly the same as Google's, where they were worried about reporters using it to twist narratives or in discovery by lawyers who came across emails.
dllthomas 3y ago
I think there are three things worth distinguishing. 1. "Don't do these bad things." 2. "Don't talk about it when you do these bad things." 3. "For chrissake don't talk like you're doing these things when you're not even doing them." 1 and 3 are appropriate, 2 isn't. I agree that the lines are not always obvious.
salawat 3y ago
No. It's really simple. Don't do those things. It's really that easy. It isn't hard. If you don't go out of your to make it so a competitor cannot emerge, you're fine. The only time employees will even utter that type of language is when that language accurately conveys what you're doing. In which case, it's time to dial back. Not double down by kindly reminding them not to use terms because golly gee, thems monopolists words and we're not that golly gee, no sir.
- Jiro 3y ago
  >The only time employees will even utter that type of language is when that language accurately conveys what you're doing. You are describing robots, not human beings. Actual people speak imprecisely all the time.
  - salawat 3y ago
    I'm really not. The only time in my life I ever read through any corporate material and was left with the words "wow, that's anti-competitive af" is pretty much only when dealing with companies that within 5 years, had anti-trust actions started against them. It is not difficult to avoid unless you set out to do it in the first place.
andy_ppp 3y ago
I was just listening to Scott Galloway's podcast where he suggests if you're a big enough percentage of any market you should be regulated as if you are a monopoly. My opinion is you should not be able to have both sides of the same business (search and ads in the case) in the same company and certainly bundling a flipping ad network/surveillance system in your "free" browser is an astonishing situation. The power Google exert over the Internet is enormous. Policing words that imply criminality is not a way to not be guilty of abusing your market position.
- ffhhttt 3y ago
  How would the search business be monetized?
  - andy_ppp 3y ago
    The same way every other website uses Ad Sense today, but they would be different companies...
    - ffhhttt 3y ago
      So a page full of massive banners and popups? How would that benefit most consumers?
      - andy_ppp 3y ago
        Google uses Ad Sense currently - just look at a SERP on Google and it would look exactly the same as it does now just Google would be selling it's space to Ad Sense or potentially other providers of Ad marketplaces. Hopefully that makes things clearer...

dekhn 3y ago

My favorite part is the core guidance Google always told us was: "how would you feel if an email wrote showed up negatively on the front page of the New York Times". I lost count of the number of times that Google execs (and senior directors) emails showed up on the front page of the Times after that; one time I opened the Times to see my own manager's email advising the android team that it was fine to reverse engineer Java code from Sun into Android.

TX81Z 3y ago
With the *really* sensitive stuff you aren’t even allowed to write a single thing down, everything is done verbally, totally off the books.
- TylerE 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/7R3fqjCL4XY?si=0uOcKDgWZhuvlZbQ https://youtu.be/7R3fqjCL4XY?si=0uOcKDgWZhuvlZbQ (NSFW language warning)
  - recursivecaveat 3y ago
    I thought for sure this would be a link to the end of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly82nabRRYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly82nabRRYc
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

lazide 3y ago

“Anything you say can and will be used against you.” It’s not just a warning, it’s reality, as you’re seeing play out here. Legal opponents will use whatever they can get ahold of. At a certain scale, it’s guaranteed you’ll have legal opponents - often constantly! - no matter what you do. Though some courses of action will certainly result in more of them! The question is, is it better or worse than the alternative? And how likely is it to actually cause you harm? Because I’m pretty sure a bunch of emails saying “We’re going to crush x by locking up the market.” would be worse. We’ll see how this plays out though!

AnonymousC123 3y ago
I suspect in the future all employee education on law will have a lawyer present who marks the discussion as client attorney priviledged. It is weird that the legal system has developed where absolutely all communication except that which has lawyers can be discovered in court. Almost like a guild support it's members. But if that's the way it is so be it. Everything will now be feature more lawyers and education on law will be client attorney privileged.
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  IANAL but you don’t get attorney client privilege just by having a lawyer in the room. You actually have to be quite careful to make sure the privilege can be asserted.
  - checkyoursudo 3y ago
    I was a lawyer (still am, just don't practice anymore), and this is true. Not only that, but if you have the wrong people in the room, then you can lose what would otherwise have been attorney-client privilege.
    - belval 3y ago
      Not seeking legal advice, just curious. Where is the line drawn with regard to attorney-client privilege in corporation with various communication tools? I was once told by a lawyer that emails were privileged (assuming you are communicating with your corporate counsel) but Slack messages with the same person were not. Is this just a lack of precedent with Slack?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> you also can't tell employees not to say those things You and I can’t. Our lawyers can. There shouldn’t be that many people at your firm who can make anticompetitive decisions. Ensure they meet 1:1 with corporate counsel to be advised on what the law is, and how the law responds to certain language. That’s not only kosher, it’s protected by privilege.

sidewndr46 3y ago
based on the discovery from this and other cases, everyone at Google believed they were entitled to meet with legal counsel and that all conversations were privileged
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > everyone at Google believed they were entitled to meet with legal counsel and that all conversations were privileged It sounds like a lot of senior people at Google don’t understand how privilege works.
- Cheezewheel 3y ago
  As someone who is ignorant of this matter, why aren't the conversations privileged? Is it because the lawyer's represent the company and not the individual personally?
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    The way I had a lawyer relate this to me was along the lines of: I ask a lawyer about the legality of specific acts I am considering. This is privileged conversation. I send an email to someone else telling them to do something (which may be in violation of one or more laws). I copy legal counsel on the email and "request their input on their subject at hand". This is not privileged communication.
- esrauch 3y ago
  I've been a swe at big cos for 10 years and I believe this because that's literally what the lawyers repeatedly informed me was the case. Every significant launch involves a moment where a senior engineer meets with legal counsel and explains the launch and counsel says if they see legal risks with the launch. It's also routine to meet with them early and discuss possible future directions or explain the business value in revisiting a standing policy to see if the benefit to risk is worth it or not. If you're saying that random engineers aren't actually entitled to meet with legal counsel and have a privileged conversation where they privately ask for directed legal advice, that would be surprising news to me.

UtopiaPunk 3y ago

What seems unfair? Government agencies are actively try to identify forming monopolies and stop them, or break them up. If a company doesn't want to face consequences for acting like a monopoly, the best way to do that is to not approach becoming a monopoly.

danaris 3y ago

Or—and hear me out here—you could just not conduct your business in such a way that you end up on trial for abusing a dominant market position. It's not like this is something that loads of companies have faced—this isn't the kind of situation where you can say "but the DoJ brings companies up on trial for this all the time, whether they've clearly got a dominant market position or not!" The rules are byzantine and complex, but the principle is simple: Compete fairly, rather than trying to eliminate your competition. If you do end up with a dominant market position, by whatever means, don't try to abuse it to keep others out of the market or small within the market. "But Wall Street" "But muh infinite growth" "But repeatedly-debunked-fiction about fiduciary duty to stockholders" No. You don't have to be a greedy, selfish, narcissistic asshole just to get by.

stefan_ 3y ago

Odd and unfair?! Companies are just an abstraction we invented purely to facilitate capitalism, a simple organizational unit in the market. If they try to monopolize and manipulate the market to defeat competition, there is no reason to keep them around.

gipp 3y ago
? Their culpability on that count has nothing to do with whether this particular argument is a fair one or not. If you do something unfair to a guilty person it was still an unfair thing
compiler-guy 3y ago
Err, companies go back before the invention of capitalism. Ignoring government chartered companies (which date back to the earliest governments, and therefore served monarchical economic systems), the first common-stock company was the Dutch East India Company (sometimes known as VOC) and was founded under a mercantilist economic system. And the VOC was hard-core manipulative and monopolistic. If you want to claim that companies were invented to serve the rapacious profiteer, then all good--that's mostly true. But as a factual matter, they are not the invention of capitalism and long predate it.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
> Companies are just an abstraction we invented purely to facilitate capitalism, a simple organizational unit in the market. No. The earliest companies in various cultures go back more than a thousand years and they have emerged for a variety of reasons -- pooled risks and resources, family businesses needing to hire non-relatives, tradesmen needing to hand their businesses on to their apprentices, etc. Capitalism is actually pretty new. It's not much older as a practice than its definition. Kongo Gumi alone existed for more than a thousand years before capitalism became a meaningful economic model. The livery companies in the UK date back 600 years before the UK was a capitalist system. And we could still have various forms of companies in a non-capitalist system, which in turn does not automatically mean communism.

aaomidi 3y ago

> This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair. Legitimately a hilarious notion to be honest.

naikrovek 3y ago

I'll tell ya, having watched the MS antitrust stuff happen vs. this, Google has a hell of a lot more apologists participating in posts like this one than Microsoft had employees at the time. Google learned a lot from prior big antitrust cases, clearly.

aaomidi 3y ago
I work at Google and the comments like the one OP had is so deeply confusing to me? If the judicial system finds that there was monopolistic behavior, then they should deal with it. People apologizing that "oh poor companies have a hard time with words" are wild to me.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Having worked at MS post anti trust, we weren't allowed to say things like "murder the competition", but I just assumed that was because they didn't want us going to jail for attempted homicide when we were just using hyperbole.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  well, believe it or not, hyperbole can't put you in jail for long, of at all. 1st Amendment. if hate speech is protected (it is) then hyperbole is protected (it is). you weren't allowed to say those things because you needed to change your corporate culture. changing how you speak at work is very effective at that. Google somehow believe that if they also dodge the phrases of the past that they will escape the scrutiny of the past, implying that they think government regulators are stupid and won't be able to see what is really happening. Google have been very, very foolish in thinking in that way.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Wait. How is Microsoft banning phrases to change corporate culture but google banning phrases isn’t to change corporate culture? Or is google just consider evil in intent by default while Microsoft isn’t?

treis 3y ago

>you also can't tell employees not to say those things or you'll see headlines like the posted article and have the government claiming at trial that you're trying to hide evidence. This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair. The point is to not do anti-competitive things. Doing them and not talking about them isn't better than doing them and talking about them. Clearly it's worse because you know you're doing something wrong and trying to get away with it.

hotnfresh 3y ago

“Don’t say ‘murder’; say ‘liquidate’ or ‘take care of’” I mean, that sure looks like evidence to me, and not in an unfair way. Calling it unfair is like “how can you possibly expect me to not get in trouble if I can’t conspire to avoid getting caught breaking the law!”

tshaddox 3y ago

Is it really that odd? The point isn't that you can't say those things and you can't tell employees to not say those things. The point is that you can't do those things, and separately, you can't tell employees to not say those things. Your characteristic made it sound like the government's end goal is for the company to simply not say those things, in which case it would be silly for them to also not allow you to tell employees to not say them. But of course the government's end goal is for the company to not do those things, and separately, they don't want the company to instruct its employees to refrain from discussing those things because that indeed looks a lot like trying to hide evidence.

summerlight 3y ago
Yes, that's very odd. Because without such corporate policy being allowed, competitors can easily bribe some employees to loudly speak it out and use it as evidence of bad acts/intention. It's almost impossible to counter it as long as they're careful enough to hide such collusion.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Prickle 3y ago
  That claim seems incredibly unfair. That is just regular corporate espionage. The reverse is possible as well. What next? Governments are not allowed to police corpY because rival corpZ will violate the laws that corpY follows; thereby stealing marketshare?
  - summerlight 3y ago
    You're overreacting. Corporate should have a minimal defense against these kinds of attacks in the court. One defense is "Okay, we don't speak this in our company. We made it clear by policy and if someone does at least this is evidence that it's not our company-wide strategy". Of course, whether this claim is accepted or not is up to the court, but interpreting this as a part of evidence destruction is pretty "creative" and I see this as a signal of being a weak case.

timeagain 3y ago

“Unfair” only in that regardless of the words used, anti-competitive practices may be prosecuted as such. If you need to educate your employees not to sound like monopolists it may be too late.

tetrep 3y ago

> This feels kind of odd and kind of unfair. Why? It's not a crime in and of itself. You're also free to make sure all your banking transactions are <$10k, but that doesn't make you immune to being investigated for money laundering.

d1sxeyes 3y ago
I was also under the impression this was true, but in fact structuring is its own crime, even if the money was obtained legally.
- deleted 3y ago
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senkora 3y ago

> you also can't tell employees not to say those things You can, but only in an regularly scheduled unrecorded meeting that is described euphemistically as “compliance training”.

happytiger 3y ago

Training employees to avoid terms that legally insinuate “market dominance” (aka, monopolies) is the smoking gun of someone trying to hide a monopoly though. How is that in any way unfair? Unfortunately that article is under lock and key login so forgive me if the comment is off point.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
I don't think it's unreasonable to fear that your employees will say something stupid that shows up in court even if you haven't done anything illegal.
- happytiger 3y ago
  There is always a balance of risk between what appears in discovery and trial to be active management of risk, the original risk of monopolistic accusations and prosecution, and the risk of false accusation due to imprudent or unconscious behavior of employees and associates of the business, irrespective of legality. I’m simply saying the smoking gun of managers managing the risk needs to be seriously considered as a possible smoking gun and not simply dismissed because of its potential as a false indicator.

oceanplexian 3y ago

I worked at another FAANG and they did exactly the same thing. There were official docs saying not to say the word monopoly, or something to that effect (It's been a few years). It felt dirty, glad to see that I was right and no, there isn't some magic legal loophole of using special phraseology to imply things that are illegal.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I was a senior person at a company best remaining nameless that trained all new executives to never use the words “monopoly,” “fix prices,” “dictate prices,” despite the fact we had a required pricing schedule for retailers, bought back all excess inventory at cost to prevent a grey market, and dropped retailers that ran promotions. Their products were never on sale and accounted for 80% of retailers revenues, and they controlled 75% of their market segment. Whenever a new upstart brand came along they simply acquired them. Everyone sold their brands because it was known unless you were owned by this company you had no long term future in the market. These sorts of market controlling companies are weird to work for. On the one hand they have a certain excellence that keeps their market lock year over year. On the other there’s a strangulating incestuous monoculture that self perpetuates a view of brilliance. You see this internally at other companies with these locks - google for one, googlers, especially hey day googlers, walk out with an ego the size of their market share. I’ve scrupulously avoided working there despite many chances over the years because of the smugness - not that I couldn’t work with that environment, I’m afraid I would adopt it as well.

ars 3y ago
ResMed and Luxottica are like that. Luxottica is a straight up abusive monopoly - they actually sell the insurance that they themselves take! ResMed simply has better technology than others, and is a de-facto monopoly.
- deepsun 3y ago
  Yes, but there's also a problem is customers really believe it's worth paying $300 for the simplest type of near-vision glasses in 2023. And they're ready to pay for that, so why not take their money?
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    It's so nuts that Facebook was able to put a computer and cameras into sunglasses without increasing the price Prescription glasses are basically just chunks of not-too-special plastic that you can buy online for $20 or less, but people refuse to believe that the whole industry is a scam when I try to tell them about it

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

The issue isn't the phrasing. It's the conspiring to violate antitrust law. If you do conspire to violate antitrust law, then telling people to hide the evidence is furthering that conspiracy. That's not unfair, it's a misunderstanding of what the illegal part is.

TX81Z 3y ago

It’s utterly uncontroversial to state that Google search has gone to shit in the last few years. Now, the question to ask is if Google wasn’t paying off other companies to make them the default would they have been more incentivized to make a better search experience? At this point I don’t get any better results from Google than DuckDuckGo/Bing. A few years ago Google was better, now they are increasingly useless and no better than competitors. If iOS users got a prompt to choose a search engine the first time they open Safari, and the order of choices was random, how many would even notice the results were different in any way?

BitwiseFool 3y ago
There are folks in my life who aren't comfortable with computers and either wouldn't know that changing the default search engine was even possible, or wouldn't feel comfortable with going into the settings because they would be afraid of breaking something.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  And Google has them hook line and sinker by virtue of paying off some competitors.
eep_social 3y ago
Kind of doesn’t sound like much of a monopoly if you’ve got two alternatives you know and are familiar with off the top.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  I think you’re missing the point about antitrust and competition. It’s about abusing your power to prevent potential competitors from competing on the merits. Paying to be a default means hardly anybody will ever see your competitors product. If everybody was able to easily see Google’s results vs competitors it’s likely they would try harder and wouldn’t have just spent all their effort on cramming more ads above the results.

yieldcrv 3y ago

and just because I used snapchat to message (which has ephemeral messaging by default, at least client side) doesnt mean I’m a hiding antitrust violations! or whatever procedurally generated idea you think I’m hiding just cocaine shipments.

gnicholas 3y ago

I remember when I was a corporate lawyer, it was common practice to search for emails that just said "call me" — an indication that there was something that they didn't want to put in writing. This wasn't a smoking gun, but it could help prove you were on the right track. Also, if you depose someone and ask them about a specific phone conversation they had, they're probably less likely to lie than if you just generally ask them if they ever talked about XYZ.

steveBK123 3y ago

Well put another way - It's one thing to tell your employees not to break the law. That's good! It's another thing to tell your employees not to use a bunch of words while doing their job which implicate the firm in breaking laws they've been accused of breaking. It's almost like an admission of guilt or attempt to obfuscate. From a bank/fund perspective - we get tons and tons of training about how we should not insider trade, money launder, etc. They have people who have gone to jail come give talks about how it's not worth it, it was the biggest mistake of their lives, etc. Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like "so hey don't use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..". It's stupid and hubristic. Just like the other stuff that came out of GOOG execs sending emails telling people not to put stuff in emails, lol. Cmon guys.

shadowgovt 3y ago
That's certainly the legal theory that the DOJ is going to push. The counter argument that I'm sure Google will bring to the table is that (a) that advice was given in the context of helping engineers understand that legal definitions and vernacular definitions are different, and it is the nature of adversarial court systems that words they think they're using with one meeting can be taken out of context by an opponent in a court case, so think about what they are saying, and (b) all of the above is just facts and the government suppressing a corporation's right to state facts would be a clear and obvious violation of the First Amendment. But these are two legal arguments and it's hard to predict how the court will decide.
Closi 3y ago
Really good comparison! Imagine… “Rather than use words like ‘insider trading’ we should say ‘based on market research’”
blindriver 3y ago
> Never ever, across half a dozen firms and 20 years, have I had training that was like "so hey don't use these terms that are used by insider traders because that would give the wrong impression when you are um.. doing your job and stuff..". Well, I have. At a large well known tech company I used to work for, we were told not to use terms like "killing our competitors", "smoking them", etc. or any words that implied we had any dominance or monopoly in our industry. We even had a "War Room" undergo a name change. The reason is exactly the same as Google's, where they were worried about reporters using it to twist narratives or in discovery by lawyers who came across emails.

dllthomas 3y ago

I think there are three things worth distinguishing. 1. "Don't do these bad things." 2. "Don't talk about it when you do these bad things." 3. "For chrissake don't talk like you're doing these things when you're not even doing them." 1 and 3 are appropriate, 2 isn't. I agree that the lines are not always obvious.

salawat 3y ago

No. It's really simple. Don't do those things. It's really that easy. It isn't hard. If you don't go out of your to make it so a competitor cannot emerge, you're fine. The only time employees will even utter that type of language is when that language accurately conveys what you're doing. In which case, it's time to dial back. Not double down by kindly reminding them not to use terms because golly gee, thems monopolists words and we're not that golly gee, no sir.

Jiro 3y ago
>The only time employees will even utter that type of language is when that language accurately conveys what you're doing. You are describing robots, not human beings. Actual people speak imprecisely all the time.
- salawat 3y ago
  I'm really not. The only time in my life I ever read through any corporate material and was left with the words "wow, that's anti-competitive af" is pretty much only when dealing with companies that within 5 years, had anti-trust actions started against them. It is not difficult to avoid unless you set out to do it in the first place.

andy_ppp 3y ago

I was just listening to Scott Galloway's podcast where he suggests if you're a big enough percentage of any market you should be regulated as if you are a monopoly. My opinion is you should not be able to have both sides of the same business (search and ads in the case) in the same company and certainly bundling a flipping ad network/surveillance system in your "free" browser is an astonishing situation. The power Google exert over the Internet is enormous. Policing words that imply criminality is not a way to not be guilty of abusing your market position.

ffhhttt 3y ago
How would the search business be monetized?
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  The same way every other website uses Ad Sense today, but they would be different companies...
  - ffhhttt 3y ago
    So a page full of massive banners and popups? How would that benefit most consumers?
    - andy_ppp 3y ago
      Google uses Ad Sense currently - just look at a SERP on Google and it would look exactly the same as it does now just Google would be selling it's space to Ad Sense or potentially other providers of Ad marketplaces. Hopefully that makes things clearer...