3 ms·

It's more like, if you intentionally started avoiding a murder spot specifically before a murder ended up happening there, you'd look a lot more likely to have

It's more like, if you intentionally started avoiding a murder spot specifically before a murder ended up happening there, you'd look a lot more likely to have had some inkling that something wrong was going to happen there than if you had just always been taking the alternative route. Similarly, if Google was intentionally avoiding using anticompetitive language, it's reasonable to think that they felt they might be facing some anticompetitive behavior related action.

lsaferite 3y ago
I'd say it's more like: A lot of people are murdered in location A, we walk past location A frequently, let's not walk by location A anymore because the police are looking at us funny. Then they get pulled into the interrogation room and they use the fact that you stopped going by location A as evidence that you were involved in the murders (that kept happening even after you stopped walking by that location).
- lmm 3y ago
  Walking past a place perfectly is legal and moral. Abuse of a dominant market position is neither. Google employees weren't being warned against talking about something innocuous that happened to be associated with crime. They were being warned against talking about doing crimes!
  - lsaferite 3y ago
    They were being warned about speech that is associated with a specific prohibited behavior in an effort to not find the company having to defend against that prohibited behavior at a later date. It's asinine to try to use preemptive training against prohibited behavior as an example of said behavior. It's worse to use it as some kind of evidence of conspiratorial behavior. It's like if I tell you "It's not ok to murder people" or "We do not murder people" in an email and then a prosecutor uses that email to say I was conspiring to commit murder. If you have a predisposition to think I'm the murderous type, sure you can read it as me trying to obscure what I'm doing. Or you could look at it as me trying to communicate that we don't freaking murder people. Choosing to read it as conspiratorial, without other evidence, says a lot about you and not the group you are accusing. At the end of the day I do think Google is too big for it's own good and perhaps they hit legal definitions of illegal monopolistic behavior. I do not thing this training is evidence of that fact and should, in fact, be evidence to the contrary.
    - wnoise 3y ago
      But the instructions weren't "it's not okay to crush the competition", they were "it's not okay to talk about crushing the competition".
      - lsaferite 3y ago
        I mean, it is ok to crush the competition. You just have to do it in a manner that is not deemed illegal, right?

lsaferite 3y ago

I'd say it's more like: A lot of people are murdered in location A, we walk past location A frequently, let's not walk by location A anymore because the police are looking at us funny. Then they get pulled into the interrogation room and they use the fact that you stopped going by location A as evidence that you were involved in the murders (that kept happening even after you stopped walking by that location).

lmm 3y ago
Walking past a place perfectly is legal and moral. Abuse of a dominant market position is neither. Google employees weren't being warned against talking about something innocuous that happened to be associated with crime. They were being warned against talking about doing crimes!
- lsaferite 3y ago
  They were being warned about speech that is associated with a specific prohibited behavior in an effort to not find the company having to defend against that prohibited behavior at a later date. It's asinine to try to use preemptive training against prohibited behavior as an example of said behavior. It's worse to use it as some kind of evidence of conspiratorial behavior. It's like if I tell you "It's not ok to murder people" or "We do not murder people" in an email and then a prosecutor uses that email to say I was conspiring to commit murder. If you have a predisposition to think I'm the murderous type, sure you can read it as me trying to obscure what I'm doing. Or you could look at it as me trying to communicate that we don't freaking murder people. Choosing to read it as conspiratorial, without other evidence, says a lot about you and not the group you are accusing. At the end of the day I do think Google is too big for it's own good and perhaps they hit legal definitions of illegal monopolistic behavior. I do not thing this training is evidence of that fact and should, in fact, be evidence to the contrary.
  - wnoise 3y ago
    But the instructions weren't "it's not okay to crush the competition", they were "it's not okay to talk about crushing the competition".
    - lsaferite 3y ago
      I mean, it is ok to crush the competition. You just have to do it in a manner that is not deemed illegal, right?