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.
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.
> 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..".
I got the same takeaway when I was at Google as when I was in the hedge fund space: be careful what you say, regulators and judges might not be very charitable. In both cases, the concept of something you say being in the New York Times was present for me.
The Googlewide training and messaging when I was there did focus on not using anti-trust-triggering _language_ over the specific acts, but I don't think it's fair to interpret this as "Violate anti-trust regulations" but rather a recognition that the common fuck-up some random employee can make isn't to commit a material anti-trust violation, but to provide nasty evidence by writing a puffy email about "crushing the competition". Telling people to write emails about "making users happy" rather than "owning the market" is not telling people to behave badly.
I don't know what you're doing in finance, but it's my understanding that folks who are actually involved in stuff where their job could look like insider trading probably do get subtler lines drawn than I ever sought (I was in systematic/program trading.) Places where doing my job well could be confused for something bad, e.g., tax optimization, we did discuss how to properly communicate in order to avoid misunderstanding if a regulator, court, or journalist ever read our communication.
My experience is that funds & staff that do have exposure to opportunities for insider info because they talk to outsiders like (brokers, company execs & IR, research providers, etc) actually get even brighter lines & rigid boxes around them.
For example - all emails to above go through compliance first & include a disclaimer that you are a market participant and do not wish to receive MNPI. Meetings with above have compliance sit in, etc. People are urged to self report if someone does volunteer something stupid to you that they shouldn't have, and then you sit out from trading it for some period, etc.
They make it very clear that the upside/downside risk is asymmetric. Hey maybe you can cheat and make 10% more this year. Or you can go to prison for 10 years, lose your home, have your wife leave you, and never work in the industry again.
Really? I doubt it. Most insiders never get caught, and those that do get relatively small fines and sentences. Many sentences are suspended or deferred. Remember: To clawback (fine) insider trading, you need to clearly prove specific profits were gained via insider trading. It is insanely hard. Even when caught, it is a tiny fraction of their wealth.
Raj Rajaratnam is one of the most notorious in the current generation. He only did 7.5 years. And Stephen Cohen had so many layers in his onion legal strategy that SEC could never nail him down.
For many normal people, having a case broaght against you is soul destroying. Yes you might get off but you have legal expenses, stress of not knowing what's going to happen, you may be unable to work at your job in the meantime. Just because you don't go to jail does not mean you are getting off free.
> The Googlewide training and messaging when I was there did focus on not using anti-trust-triggering _language_ over the specific acts, but I don't think it's fair to interpret this as "Violate anti-trust regulations"
that's fair - did they also provide training on actually not violating anti-trust regulations, or was it just how to avoid leaving evidence of violations?
Again, there's not a ton rank-and-file people could _do_ to impact anti-trust-related behavior. The fear is reputational, so that's what that explicit training was about
The additional rank-and-file training and process that ties into actual anti-trust-related behavior is how to contact a lawyer as well as the fact that a lawyer and executive needs to review and approve all of the most minor of launches.
Do you have an idea of what the relevant training you would prescribe for a random mid-career engineer or UX researcher or whatever would be?
I'm looking for what was done. Were employees even told that anticompetitive behavior itself was bad? Were they given training on what it looks like, and when to report it for further investigation?
If they can develop training that says "don't say bundle", they can develop training that says "don't bundle", and in both cases they might want their employees to talk to a company lawyer if they have any questions anyways
also curious if the lawyers themselves had rules like "don't bundle" that they would pass along to employees with questions, or if google was okay with bundling
If you worked at Google and you weren’t aware that the whole thing (including your and your colleagues’ big comps) was built on capturing the online ad market then I don’t know how else people like you can be made to see that they worked for something at the limit of breaking the law.
It’s like an investment banker back in 2006 saying that he was doing everything by the book, which he might of well have done, but the whole thing was crooked nevertheless.
> 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.
Were you given training not to kill your competitors? Were you?
I think my concern is that the important thing is not to do illegal things. If training focuses on just not sounding like you do illegal things instead of just not doing illegal things, that’s the problem.
> If training focuses on just not sounding like you do illegal things instead of just not doing illegal things, that’s the problem.
No, that isn't the problem.
The problem is that the difference between violating the law and not violating the law is whether you used what the court/jury felt to be inappropriate language. "Not sounding like you do illegal things" is how you avoid violating the law. Your actions are less relevant than your commentary on those actions directed to your friends.
That's why the training focuses on using the right magic words and tabooing the wrong ones. The training is there to help you follow the law, no matter how stupid the law might be.
> "Not sounding like you do illegal things" is how you avoid violating the law.
only if the regulators investigating you are complete morons, which may be the case once in a while, but I doubt it is for any large case like this one.
regulators see straight through doublespeak and careful wording. buzzwords and corporate lingo are completely transparent to anyone who spends a single moment thinking about the message that the words are conveying, and regulators have far more experience cutting through that stuff than just about anyone else.
> regulators see straight through doublespeak and careful wording
No they don't, Microsoft didn't do this training and got nailed for bundling internet explorer with windows. Then Microsoft and all other big tech companies started to police words and look, no big anti trust like that has happened in US since. As long as Microsoft says "we always open edge no matter the settings when you click links in our products to ensure the best customer experience", instead of "we always open edge to increase edge market share", they wont get nailed in USA.
You are not really engaging with these training materials in context. The entire point of the training is to not draw conclusions in areas in which you are not an expert, in discoverable media. For example, you are a software developer. Writing to your colleague that this change-list reduces an algorithm from quadratic to linear time complexity is within your wheelhouse. Posting on a mailing list that you think some other team's product will crush the competition is not really within your domain, because you are not an economist. Drawing conclusions of law is the worst of all things to do because even though you're just some idiot, those conclusions become discoverable and opposing council will put them on the record out of context even though you are just a Junior Associate Moron, not a person in a position to draw that conclusion.
Well the training as I remember it is not really about how to fix your attitude, it is about how to avoid this gotcha. The thing is, opposing counsel would never be allowed to ask a deponent to draw a conclusion of law in a deposition. If they asked you do you think such and such thing is anticompetitive, your lawyer will object and you won’t have to answer. But, if you had emailed your pal at work and volunteered that you think something is anticompetitive, that’s admissible, even though you still aren’t qualified to draw that conclusion. Then at trial they will say “Google knew this was anticompetitive!” even though the member of the organization who “knew” this was a probationary sys admin.
When one actually suspects that something is anticompetitive, subverts the privacy policy, or is against the law, the done thing is to go talk to an attorney. Either product counsel inside the company if you are just curious or concerned in good faith, or your own attorney if you think the company is acting in bad faith.
If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend watching David Boies interview Bill Gates for his deposition in Microsoft’s antitrust trial. The whole thing is on YouTube and it’s fascinating.
They spend a lot of time parsing just what Gates and others on his executive team meant by things like “cut off [Netscape’s] air supply”.
Regardless of who you think “wins” these exchanges, the government thought that putting Gates in a position where he had to explain this kind of language would be embarrassing and discrediting.
No one ever got busted for anti-trust violations by doing things that help support the competition.
Describing something in terms of helping the competition while actually doing the opposite, will get you dunked on doubly so. If you think equivocation is they to doing illegal things, my dear poster, snap out of it and feel the Terra firma, because you're so high, the FAA can do an airspeed check.
> No one ever got busted for anti-trust violations by doing things that help support the competition.
Actually anti-trust training I have gone through mostly emphasizes that you should never ever help the competition or talk to them, because that sounds like forming an illegal oligopoly.
I think the issue here is a corporate kind of mens rea. It’s seemingly fine under capitalism to incidentally kill your competitors in the process of making your customers happy. It’s not fine to set out with the explicit goal of killing your competitors. And so, any mention of your being aware that you’re killing your competitors, hints that you might be intentionally killing them while just feigning ignorance.
Exactly this. Even though we were engaging in regular competition, us simply mentioning that we wanted to "kill them" or "wipe them out" could be falsely construed as us trying to use illegal means to do so, which we weren't.
And that's the point. Lawyers can twist things written in emails to be whatever they want. People who say "if you're not doing anything illegal, then you have nothing to hide" has never been at the hands of a witch hunt. I have a friend who lived in the US on F1 and H1B for over 10 years and was banned from entering the US over jokes with her ex-bf about marrying for a green card.
> I have a friend who lived in the US on F1 and H1B for over 10 years and was banned from entering the US over jokes with her ex-bf about marrying for a green card.
That's insane, especially after her being in the US for 10+ years and having established a life there. Sorry to go off-topic, but I have a friend whose SO is on a work visa and they have joked about the marrying for a green card thing before (a very common joke it seems). How did the government find out about the joke? (in-person, through texts, etc.) I ask because I wouldn't want the same to happen to them and to caution them.
Yes. And discovery in these trials is performed via keyword matching so you have to assume that every email is going to end up on a giant projector screen in front of a jury who might not understand that Bob’s enthusiasm for destroying the competition is Bob’s quirky bombastic communication style rather than a business strategy.
I meant “in the implicit context of having successfully destroyed all your competitors [potentially by doing things other than just selling a better product, harder], and then being put on trial for anti-trust allegations.”
I can't speak to this particular situation, but your argument has "if you'll had nothing to hide then you would have nothing to fear" vibes.
You don't seem to account for the possibility of a situation where an entity is not guilty, but gets in trouble anyway because of someone's words.
No that's not it at all.
If they are concerned about monopoly allegations, they should give anti-monopolistic-practices training to staff.
Instead they are giving anti-monopolistic-language training to staff.
You may not believe it, but no financial firm I've ever worked for gave me training on "don't use insider training language". All the training was emphatically that they did not want us to do it, it would destroy the company and destroy our lives explicitly. It was drilled into our heads with live talks, videos, handbooks, attestations, etc.
This GOOG training seems to be like "how to pass a sobriety test" rather than "don't drunk drive".
Insider trading and anti-trust violations aren't comparable. It's pretty easy to tell someone not to trade on insider knowledge, and it's pretty easy for an employee with a little experience to tell when they are doing so. How do you tell employees not to engage in monopolistic behavior? Be less competitive? Don't push out products that too many people will like? I would say the basic issue is that anti-trust laws are entirely subjective, enforcement is usually politically motivated. Given this subjectivity, it makes more sense to care about appearances rather than some ill-defined "substance".
Anti trust isn't that opaque, it just hasn't been actively prosecuted for the last few decades.
There's a ton of stuff that has been allowed to happen via consolidation, merger, or pure homegrown that simply hasn't been prosecuted because recent administrations had an alternate theory that monopolies are OK if it benefits consumers via lower prices. Tech gives out a lot of stuff free or where its cost is hard to directly measure.
Tech also enjoyed bipartisan support for the last 20 years or so, but that has completely flipped over the last 4 years or so. We will likely see a lot of this stuff is no longer ignored.
In saying that different administration priorities and changes in political support for tech drive anti-trust actions you are making my point (which I maybe didn't make clear). That kind of arbitrariness means firm's counsel can't say "don't do X" like you want them to. Because "X" shifts. It also means counsel sensibly focuses on appearances, since appearances can be the main driver of political support.
> There's a ton of stuff that has been allowed to happen via consolidation, merger, or pure homegrown that simply hasn't been prosecuted because recent administrations had an alternate theory that monopolies are OK if it benefits consumers via lower prices.
That's not incompatible with violations in other circumstances. For example, Google releases Android for free, resulting in low prices for mobile operating systems. Competing operating systems may be put out of business, but customers benefit from lower prices and this should be fine if anyone can still choose to use a competing OS -- or fork of Android -- should they prefer it.
Whereas, Google uses tying to its dominant services to ensure that Google Play is the only viable app store on Android, then takes a 30% cut. High margins don't result in lower prices and neither does excluding competitors who might take a smaller cut, so they should be slapped down for this.
Google adds remote attestation and encourages third parties to rely on it even though it makes third party apps dependent on Google's version of the system, creating a barrier to entry for forks or competitors. This kind of thing should be prohibited, because otherwise people are not choosing Google's offering because it provides the best value for money, they're choosing it because Google manufactured a way to shut out competitors who might do better.
The theory isn't the problem. Taking a competitor's market share because customers choose your product for having a better price is not bad. The bad is making it harder for customers to choose competing alternatives they might actually prefer.
The problem is the application. The company comes up with some claim that their anti-competitive moat is there to benefit customers by providing security etc. and get away with it even though it doesn't really provide security or there are viable alternatives that provide security without restricting competition.
Again, this isn't a comment on the merits of Google's case in particular. I'm not supporting what they're alleged to have done here, nor claiming they've been angels all around. What I'm saying is "they told people to not use risky language" isn't necessarily a sign that they were guilty or doing something illegal, just like it isn't with everyday folks. Because prudent people will care about language either way, because they know it can get them in trouble regardless.
With that said...
> You may not believe it, but no financial firm I've ever worked for gave me training on "don't use insider training language"
These are apples and oranges. You may not believe it either, but I don't think Google tells anyone "don't use insider trading language" either. That's the apples-to-apples comparison.
AFAIK being a monopoly is a corporate civil matter, not a (strictly personal?) criminal one like insider trading. Expecting people to treat them the same way and claiming they're guilty if they don't makes no sense.
There is very little non-executive level employees can do to engage or not engage in monopolistic practices. All the decisions that lead to that are generally taken way above so such training would be pretty useless. Insider trading is very different in that regard because it’s something individuals can engage in and (usually) not the outcome of corporate strategy.
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.
"First, Google wants to withhold from the public internal emails from more than 10 and up to 15 years ago. See Sept. 1, 2023 Hrg Tr. at 62-63, 65. DCN is highly skeptical that communications over a decade old could possibly interfere with Googles competitive business today and in the future. These emails would instead inform the public and press about practices that led to the government filing suit.
Second, Google wants to withhold from the public certain provisions of its standard agreements, including definitions contained in such agreements, many of which were signed more than ten years ago. Id. at 56, 65-69. These agreements and definitions are foundational to the publics understanding of how Google established its dominant market position.
Third, Google wants to clear the courtroom during the overwhelming majority of Googles examination of Apple witnesses, which could span several days. Id. at 69-70. There is substantial public interest in Googles deal with Apple and the termination of the agreement. There does not appear to be any good reason to close the trial completely for this testimony other than to shield Google and Apple from potential embarrassment."
“Politicians and regulators are always playing catch up. They are so dumb. We are creating the future” - some tech bro
They don’t take society seriously. They don’t take the law seriously. At best they aren’t thinking about what they are saying. At worst they feel they are justified.
Treat the law seriously. Don’t break the law. If you do those two things you will not need to send memos around to get people to use phrases which regulators will grep your comms and transcripts for.
The steelman argument for this type of instruction is that employees routinely make legal pronouncements that they are not competent to make.
Imagine a scenario where a PM or engineer writes down in a memo something like "Option #1 is a breach of antitrust regulations" or "This violates EU privacy regulations". These are often well meaning statements but the reality is most (all?) of the time these people have no idea what they are talking about (which EU privacy regulation? what are the elements of the antitrust law and how does the action implicate each one? etc).
However, a statement like this is highly prejudicial to a court as it indicates fore-knowledge of wrongdoing especially if it is made by someone fairly senior in the organization (eg middle management and higher).
The better option is to pose the assertion as a question directed to your lawyer. This has the benefit of (a) attorney client privilege so the document cannot be discovered in court and, more importantly, (b) getting someone who has the relevant expertise to weigh in on whether what you think is in fact true so you can base your decision making on facts and not random persons opinion of the law.
NB: Imagine your legal team weighing in on whether you should design your architecture as a microservice or monolith. That is the equivalent level of hubris for a non-legal person weighing in on the legal implications of particular courses of action.
On the other hand, the Law should care only if your actions broke it, and not what kind of things you told somebody. (And if you exploited your monopoly completely by chance and got a couple of billions out of it, too bad, you are guilty anyway.)
But until we have that, people will keep studying what they can and can't say.
From a consulted a bank perspective - I noticed that the examples were pretty darn intuitive that hey this is obviously illegal but for some reason they wanted to have people sit through a multiple choice form and 45 minute tutorial on banking ethics to make sure nobody did it, and also that one of the negative outcomes that was mentioned in breaking the code of ethics was that the bank would experience problems in the media that would make the whole thing which seemed like a good idea not worth it.
I'm in a bank tech division and the training is mostly just "here is what antitrust looks like, contact legal and compliance if you ever feel like this apply to you." My guess is that if you contact them, they'll tell you in person what not to write in emails.
> 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.
Not to be paranoid, but that's also how a bank that wanted people to insider trade would act. The idea is, you see the people who got caught, learn what they get caught for, and carve the apple just a little bit less than they did.
A principled (naive) person imbibes the meaning "Don't do bad stuff", and an ambitious (sociopathic) person learns how to do it and what gets caught.
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.
Oh man, I worked for a long time on the east coast in industries that didn't give me much exposure to startups during the 90s-00s, so one day I met an ex-Google developer at a meetup who dropped into the conversation that he once worked for Google and then waited for me to be impressed. It was a long awkward wait because I didn't realize at the time that that was supposed to impress me, and instead just said something like "oh cool" and the conversation just abruptly stopped in the weirdest way you can imagine.
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?
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
Anything insurance touches becomes expensive, because insured individuals are no longer price sensitive, so there is no incentive to lower costs by providers.
My employer pays for my vision insurance, whether I want it or not, so I may as well maximize the benefit with the "best" hardware I can get for "free."
Your employer offers it, and you use it, because the government specifically carved out a tax exemption for it. Without the tax benefit, there would not be much reason for an employer to provide you vision insurance rather than the equivalent cash.
I set up the vision health plan for my company, and you can certainly waive that (and save some out-of-pocket $$ as well, as employer cannot pay 100% of the insurance, ot at least I couldn't find a 100% option).
That's because those $20 glasses are objectively worse than $200 Costco glasses. You might not think that the latter is worth the increased price, but for the vast majority of Americans it is.
Btw Zeiss (known to HNers for making EUV lithography hardware) also makes glasses and you can buy them online. Some of their lenses are $700. Not worth it for me, but I can definitely see how someone would be willing to pay even more for those optical specs
I have zeiss lenses on my glasses, they’re terrible. Full of scratches in 1.5 years. Worst money I’ve ever spent, my last no name €80 lenses went for years without a single scratch! Anecdata obviously
What, do you think they scratched them on purpose? Avoiding scratching for thousands of hours isn't actually simple, and if some brand is less scratchable then that's a real benefit.
The $30-50 zenni glasses/lenses in my experience are actually substantially clearer than the (absolute ripoff) $400-500 rayban ones. Same prescription, and the zenni ones even arrived quicker! Frame consistency is a bit of an issue though, I bought a few more cheap pairs with the 'same' frame a few years later and they changed the design subtly which made them fit worse.
> Luxottica is a straight up abusive monopoly - they actually sell the insurance that they themselves take!
What is wrong with this? Apple does it, lots of managed healthcare organizations like Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealth and CVS do it, auto manufacturers do it, etc.
It's not actually insurance, it's a payment plan. Insurance is meant to cover unexpected events, with this you pay a monthly fee for "insurance" which gives you the right to buy the glasses later for a normal price.
The other companies you mention are actual insurance: They cover rare, and unexpected events. As opposed to covering once every two year glasses, on a schedule.
Because you end up paying around 50 times as much as what the glasses actually cost.
But because of how they do it they hide that. $40/month for 2 years = $960 "for insurance" which gives you the right to buy glasses worth around $20 or so.
All the number are inflated leaving people with the impression that glasses cost $400 - they don't.
The average person doesn't consider them to be a viable option. Don't ask me why, but it's true. And them being considered a viable option is a prerequisite to competition working right.
The average person (at least in the US) does not consider the world’s largest retailer, with a well known reputation for being the cheapest, an option? I don’t buy that.
That WalMart link is to decorative glasses, not prescription glasses.
So here's the thing with WalMart and Luxottica - their insurance does not fully cover WalMart! They give you a significantly reduced amount with WalMart (or Costco), that's how you know it's fraudulent - they only want to cover their own stores, that's not a normal behavior for "insurance".
The insurance is only a thing because the tax code allows it as a way for employers to pay people with untaxable money in the form of insurance, so it is not a real insurance market.
Calling it insurance rather than a payment plan or something.
Further it’s got some serious conflict of interest going on with how the benefits are structured. So a plan may cover 1 300$ par of glasses, but not 2 pairs of 150$ glasses specifically to minimize the risk of a race to the bottom etc.
It’s not obvious to me. “Make a compelling product that speaks to an unfulfilled desire with pitch perfect marketing, relentless quality, and flawless execution” seems to be what differentiates who we acquired. There were a lot of startup brands and only a few were acquired in my time. Most just died.
I’d say they do a good job of acquiring and learning and teaching. When they take on a brand they don’t subsume them but let them be fairly autonomous, but take on certain commoditized aspects such as supply chain, distribution, and marketing placement. The core of the brand stays independent and some of the learning of that brand comes back into the core company. They also are very self critical and internally striving. But, yes, they could certainly be better and healthy competition would help.
“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!
I suspect if you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and you tell your employees not to use phrases like "We'll crush the competition" and instead talk about how "You'll try to maintain a competitive environment while doing your best to excel" it's probably better than your legal opponents finding evidence that people in your company are constantly talking about abusing their power to "crush the competition".
I guess we'll get an idea by the result of this lawsuit.
I'm still suspicious of the idea that Google can have a monopoly anywhere except maybe in the Android ecosystem. It is too easy to move away from their products and go use something else. Nobody is under any pressure to use Google's search. Literally Google "alternatives to google search" and get a list of reasonable alternatives. If they have outstanding market share it is because they are just better, not because they have a monopoly [0].
But the problem I'm looking at here is the phrase "...you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power..." anticipates the result to some degree. This is a an exhaustive list of the guidance lawyers can provide. Both seem to anticipate that some wrongdoing has been done. It leads to shallow thinking:
... you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and lawyers tell employees not to use phrases like "We'll crush the competition".
... you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and lawyers provide no guidance, then employees use phrases like "We'll crush the competition".
Most of the work is actually being done by the initial frame, not what the employees are told.
Google used the search monopoly to grow chrome into another monopoly, placing it on their front page, a place where absolutely no one else can ever get advertising.
Chrome's engine is open source, and there is literally nothing stopping someone from installing Brave, Firefox or Opera. They all render the same pages and are all standards compliant enough.
Did Google give Chrome a boost? Yes. Was that a good thing? Also yes. Chrome was the better browser at the time they did that - still arguably is. But that doesn't mean monopolies are involved. Apple gives privileged advertising to the iPhone, iPod and iPad on their website and they aren't a monopoly in any sense.
Google is arguably less of a monopoly in pushing Chrome because they sell advertising to other people. I'm sure Samsung would pay an absurd amount of money to get an ad on apple.com with any URL path. In theory Google could be a monopoly and put a chrome ad on google.com but the fact is that they aren't a monopoly and pushing chrome did good for the world, not harm. They're just providing exceptional products and people trust the brand [0].
roenxi: "Google doesn't have a monopoly. [argument]"
AlphaSite: "Google has a monopoly and used it to build a second monopoly [argument]"
There isn't much there to address. But I did directly address it.
(1) He claimed that Google had a monopoly, I ignored that because I'd addressed that in my original comment.
(2) He claimed that Chrome had a monopoly. I provided an argument that it wasn't (it is really easy not to use Chrome. You give up literally nothing switching to Brave for example).
(3) He claimed that Googe used monopoly tactics to build Chrome's market share. I provided a counterexample that the tactics used aren't monopoly tactics because other companies do more or less the same thing. Advertising your own products on your own site isn't monopoly behaviour. And even if Google was a monopoly and that is monopoly behavior - both of which I don't think are true - that isn't exactly an abuse of monopoly power, it is pretty tame.
It'd be helpful for me if you pointed out why you don't think that is addressing the comment. It seemed pretty direct to me.
* Internet Explorer came bundled with the OS and therefore had a leg up on the competition. They made it impossible to remove that browser, so people targeting Windows would likely also automatically target IE in the knowledge that it would be available on the system.
* Microsoft controlled the Windows API and appeared to be sabotaging attempts to build cross-platform applications. And they seemed to think it was substantial interference. Take this for example:
"Microsoft's videotape showed the process as being quick and easy, resulting in the Netscape icon appearing on the user's desktop. The government produced its own videotape of the same process, revealing that Microsoft's videotape had conveniently removed a long and complex part of the procedure and that the Netscape icon was not placed on the desktop, requiring a user to search for it. Brad Chase, a Microsoft vice president, verified the government's tape and conceded that Microsoft's own tape was falsified." [0]
If MS had restricted itself to a banner on their website saying "Download and Install IE!" they'd have been fine; the issue was that they were creating an environment to destroy Netscape for no good technical reason, they just wanted to destroy Netscape. And that was part of a pattern of behaviour where they were employing consistent tactics against anyone trying to create cross-platform software.
I did say about 3 comments up that I could see them being a monopoly maybe in the Android ecosystem. I don't want anything to do with Android phones because I don't like Google, so I don't understand what is happening in that world.
Then IMO they would be a monopoly on iOS in a similar way. You change the default search engine on Android too, most people don’t know how/don’t care/etc.
Now I’m not sure that something you could actually define as a monopoly but they do control almost the entire search market on mobile because they directly control Android and pay Apple huge amounts of money to achieve the same on Safari.
This is kind of what's sad at working at a big company. If the same team was doing the same work at a startup, every one of their meetings can be "this feature will kill the competition". Personally I think it's a great attitude; if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business. And you're certainly entitled to try. (And, sometimes ideas do kill their industry. Called someone on your landline recently? Bought a DVD at the store? Listened to music on a Walkman? It happens.)
The devil is always in the details. If you kill the US steel industry by being a government that pays people to buy steel from your country, that's problematic. If you just make shit and people like it, though, that should never be illegal.
> if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business.
The issue is that, once you reach Google scale, you have so many tools to put the competition out of business that are unrelated to product fit. And, in the case of Google, they've been known to do just that.
So yeah, you can't really compare an incumbent with monopoly power to an underdog, just like some sentences from young kids are hilarious, that would be chilling if adults said them.
It is not problematic to put people out of business by having a superior product. It is problematic to abuse the fact that you have more money, connections, lawyers, political power, market control, customer interaction control, etc.
Absolutely, and the fact that our lawmakers cannot distinguish the two, and rely on fighting the last war with dumb heuristics based on phraseology is a real social problem.
> Personally I think it's a great attitude; if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business.
I think this "Others must lose so that I win" attitude is one of the more toxic attributes of this Thunderdome Capitalism so many industries have somehow ended up in. Wouldn't it be great if we could have dozens of businesses all successful, all doing "somewhat good" rather than having to always have a small number of winners that take everything?
If I'm going to open a laundromat a block away from Paul's competing laundromat, I'm not doing it to try to put Paul out of business. I'm just trying to capture enough business so that we can coexist comfortably. Some entrepreneurs just don't know the meaning of the word "enough".
I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. If you're making nails or something, then sure, your factory can only turn so many tons of coiled steel into nails per day. So other companies can exist that also make nails. In software, it's a little different; you moving a billion copies doesn't necessarily take any more work than selling one copy, so even if you "want to leave enough for everyone", you might not be able to. I doubt the Chrome team was saying things like "we shouldn't add tabs, that would be so bad for Internet Explorer".
But if your laundromat is better in some way (service, cost, marketing), why wouldn't you want to grow? And if the market is a fixed size, (which just about every market is) doesn't that inevitably result in Paul adapting to keep up or closing down? When did it become immoral to realize this and strive for it? In this scenario everyone besides Paul benefits. And so it will be when you become the incumbent and face a competitor with a similar edge.
In Google's case, I suspect "search" will die to AI like Blackberries died to iPhones. Google is already proving that its size and bureaucratic unwieldiness are major obstacles to its competing in the AI space. Would we really hold back the vast social benefits of this progress because we object to some people becoming obscenely wealthy?
I feel like this comment exists in a capitalist fairy tale where the only way a business could grow to overtake its competitors is by being better for consumers. Or where a business that has done so will always continue to do so once it has achieved market dominance.
> But if your laundromat is better in some way (service, cost, marketing), why wouldn't you want to grow?
Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?
I mean, in the medium term, isn't this exactly how it goes? Aren't current incumbents relatively recent, and didn't they get there by being substantially better than their competition (Amazon, Google, Apple, Uber) or creating an entirely new business model (Facebook, Twitter). Isn't the dominant position that these companies enjoy only as fragile as the continued use of their product? If everyone switches to OpenAI for their search needs, Google will have a hard time surviving.
> Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?
It's enough, until someone comes up with something that disrupts the industry. In a fast-evolving world, standing still is a doomed strategy. Do you really want to be the bookseller when Amazon comes along? Or the taxi driver competing with Uber? or on the board of RIM watching the Apple keynote in 2007?
Edit: Come to think of it, this rather parallels the natural world. Very few creatures have been able to stay relatively unchanged for tens of millions of years. They have been able to do so because the niche the evolved to optimally fill has remained unchanged and undisrupted. The rest of the natural world undergoes constant churn as new species emerge and others go extinct. It's the same in business. The less likely your niche is to be disrupted the more insulated you'll be from the necessity to change (assuming you've optimally adapted). Prime examples are best-in-class restaurants, whose proprietors often do just about the same thing their entire lives very successfully.
Just as an example, google has recently enshittified chrome to include gross invasions of privacy. How much has this moved the needle on chrome's browser share?
If it was as simple as people just ceasing continued use of the product, one would expect a large dip. If there are other effects in play besides "use that which is better, switch anytime" (e.g. anticompetitive behaviors), one would expect there not to be.
So, what reality do the numbers reveal?
p.s. the same exercise can be done regarding google's enshittification of search, and seeing how many people change the default search in chrome as a result
> How much has this moved the needle on chrome's browser share?
It depends on your timescale. Early adopters are already shifting away from it. I don't expect these effects to be immediate, but do you expect that everyone will still be using Chrome in 10 years? 20? 30? The same can be said of search. Early adopters are already using ChatGPT for many queries.
I do, if this efficient market hypothesis were to hold true
The changes to the browser were immediate from one version to the next, what would stop everyone who doesn't like that from switching browsers instead of upgrading?
The fact that it isn't immediate kind of proves the point: the market doesn't always favor the best product, because dominant players can exploit their market position to make anti-features and hide them from users
If there was a truly efficient market, this behavior would be immediately punished. That it was not, proves that there is not.
If a dominant company can abuse its users for a decade or more before the market handles the problem, that speaks to a lack of a competitive environment, or anticompetitive behavior. The market has failed, and thus some intervention is warranted to stop the abuse sooner than that. I propose for your economic theory, though, the title of "eventual efficiency" in markets :)
Markets are exceptionally efficient over time, just like nature. Barring cataclysm, organisms that are displaced from their niches take ages to go extinct. It's the same with businesses. And what do you mean "immediate"? Days? Months? Years? Market effects take time, as anyone who has studied marketing will tell you.
> what would stop everyone who doesn't like that from switching browsers instead of upgrading?
The fact that they're human beings with their own lives and finite attention spans. There is an entire body of work segmenting markets into categories like innovators, early adopters, early majority, etc.
Did you wait in line for an iPhone on launch day? Why not?
> that speaks to a lack of a competitive environment
The environment is plenty competitive. There is no further proof required of this than the continued rise of new companies that displace their competition. In a thriving ecosystem there is lots of death as well as lots of birth.
> The market has failed
It hasn't, it just doesn't move on timescales you can relate to easily. Organizing people to make and distribute things takes unimaginable time and energy. Supposing that a centrally planned intervention can be more efficient is the height of communist fallacy. It has failed every time it has been tried.
the environment is not competitive enough. There is no further proof required of this than that google can abuse its users and make products worse for years, perhaps decades, without experiencing market punishment for it
the end determines the sufficiency of the means: if the end is that google can do that, the current means are insufficient, because that is bad
> Organizing people to make and distribute things takes unimaginable time and energy.
it absolutely does, far, far moreso when you're going up against a giant like google
solution: slay the giant. We've tried not doing so, and it brought us here, to this failure point.
I think the “winner takes all” attitude is the problem. It’s perfectly fine to run a tech company with a limited market but it doesn’t generate the spectacular returns current investors are looking for.
That depends entirely on the details of how it is said.
If it is said in a way clearly making it obvious that not just the words, but the intent is bad, and to instead do the other thing? Seems likely to not be an issue.
If it is saying the intent is fine, just use the other words? Then yeah.
If it gets to the press, chances are it’s being spun the opposite way that context would show it was being used, because that’s how it usually works to get clicks.
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.
That sounds weird because it isn’t how it works. The courts take a dim view of clients who attempt to abuse attorney-client privilege by putting all communications under it.
(A good heuristic for legal reasoning is that anything that sounds like a “one weird trick to avoid getting prosecuted” listicle item has already been picked clean by the courts.)
"Facts can't be privileged" is how one lawyer at a place I worked with put it, regarding attempted tricks like this. Only specific discussions asking for counsel can be. So as far as I understand what could be protected in something like this training case: questions about how to make the training? Sure. The training itself? Nope.
It's hard to see the line here: if a lawyer has a 1:1 meeting with someone and tells them that using certain terms can be legally risky that's protected? If he has a group meeting with 10 execs to advise the same? One lawyer gives the same advice to 100 people, 1000 people, 10000 people what is the number of people receiving the information where verbatim the exact same conversation isn't legally protected anymore?
This is a weird way to view the test. The conversation is privileged if the conversation includes the provision (or seeking) of legal advice from the lawyer to (by) their client. That means that the contents of the conversation cannot be forced to be divulged; however, if the conversation is about a specific event and the legal impacts of that it doesn’t bring the facts of that event under the privilege.
“Joey said that we can kill the competition with this new feature, is that going to be a problem for us from an antitrust perspective?”
Privileged: whether or not that is going to be a problem from an antitrust perspective
Non-privileged: Joey said that we can kill the competition with this new feature
The number of people is irrelevant except as a gauge for whether or not legal advice is actually being provided. If you were to cc an entire department on an email to your counsel with the above question it wouldn’t change the analysis. Recall that in the corporate context the corporation is the client and employees are the corporation’s agents. Whether 1 or 100 employees, it’s the same corporation.
What should be the “correct” answer legally is that, if the lawyer is providing the training, it should be privileged regardless of how often it occurs or how many people are trained. The potential catch here is that you can’t use privilege to protect conversations where you’re telling people how to commit a crime, and teaching hundreds of people how not to lose antitrust buzzword bingo starts to look suspiciously like telling (or even helping) your client (the corporation) how to get away with a crime.
Training is not privileged, for the same reason CC’ng an entire department will cause one to lose privilege on a conversation.
There are parties privy to the conversation (which the parties are aware are party to the conversation) that aren’t even remotely plausibly trying to get legal advice, or part of the matter being advised on in any direct way.
Trainings aren’t seeking legal advice.
Being a random employee reading email isn’t seeking legal advice.
The larger the group, the less plausible any argument gets for this reason. There is no way a lawyer is having a conversation or giving legal advice (actual advice) to 100 people at once. Even 10 is highly improbable.
If all parties to the conversation can’t even plausibly claim it’s a private conversation with their lawyer to seek legal advice, then the courts aren’t going to even think of taking a privilege claim seriously.
Even if they can it can still be pierced if there is evidence privilege was used to commit crimes, further a conspiracy, etc.
Nothing you’ve said is true categorically and many attorney hours have been spent arguing both sides of this with the outcome being anything but predictable. Again, the test is whether an attorney is communicating legal advice to the client (or such is being sought), which happens to be the corporation that acts via its employees. It’s rare in the legal context for someone to make a statement that is unarguably wrong, but luckily this is one of them:
“[T]raining materials prepared by in-house counsel to advise employees on the law applicable to their jobs are entitled to [attorney-client] protection because they provide legal advice.”
That is a rather special edge case - it was specifically directed training that she specifically requested on specific legal issues directly applicable to her job, directly communicated to her by an attorney, clearly marked as confidential, and was nearly purely legal advice directly applicable to her job.
It wasn’t a class given widely, it wasn’t broad or generic, it wasn’t given unsolicited, etc.
No. It was training given to the HR department. Thorman received generic training regarding how to classify exempt employees from an attorney. Thorman did not request the training personally.
It was a training given widely, and online. It was arguably broad and generic. It was given unsolicited (unless you count every training an employee is told to do as unsolicited).
The fact that you misunderstand the factual and procedural posture of this opinion should key you in to how out of your depth you are.
Let’s return to what was originally under discussion.
From you: “10 execs? Maybe. If they’re all involved in the same thing and all asking for advice. Seems unlikely to actually be the case though. So probably not.
100 folks listening to a presentation? Definitely not covered.”
From you: “Trainings aren’t seeking legal advice.
Being a random employee reading email isn’t seeking legal advice.
The larger the group, the less plausible any argument gets for this reason. There is no way a lawyer is having a conversation or giving legal advice (actual advice) to 100 people at once. Even 10 is highly improbable.
If all parties to the conversation can’t even plausibly claim it’s a private conversation with their lawyer to seek legal advice, then the courts aren’t going to even think of taking a privilege claim seriously.”
Here we have a standard training that was conducted online to an entire department via slideshow. Is it privileged? According to your heuristics, it’s not. Clearly it was.
Every discovery fight is a special edge case. Every assertion of privilege is a discovery fight, and the privilege itself is a special edge case. That’s why I said corporate privilege is hard in theory and even harder in practice.
Client
/attorney privilege doesn’t work that way. :(
But frankly, all the G stuff was with attorney guidance and well vetted. It already had what you’re trying to get to the best of the very well paid attorney’s ability.
> Not only that but someone once told me to write the following before any email communications:
That only applies when corresponding with counsel, and even there in limited circumstances (not everything can be privileged). If no attorney is addressed, it cannot be privileged.
IIRC, applying the label arbitrarily risks all correspondence being made discoverable.
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.
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?
- you have to have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the communication (yelling it across a crowded room, or using a line you know is recorded by someone else means no privilege)
- it needs to be a legitimate attempt to receive counsel from said attorney.
- the only other folks who are in the communication are also related to the matter and also clients of the attorney (or attorneys for you).
So asking your attorney ‘hey, I ran over someone - am I in trouble?’ over direct private email (or other channel) that is private? That’s privileged.
CC’ng your attorney on a thread where you’re conspiring between 3-4 other people so that ‘it’s attorney client priviledged’, but the thread isn’t about you getting legal advice about the legality of the endeavor?
Not privileged.
Think of it this way:
- the courts want to be sure that you can have direct conversations with your attorney on legal matters. That includes asking questions about the law, defending yourself, etc. and they don’t want you to have to worry about putting your foot in your mouth in the process. Because a big reason attorneys exist is because people will put their foot in their mouth constantly without help.
- the courts also want to be sure that the truth of any legal matter (with the assistance of your attorney) is found in a speedy, accurate, and expeditious manner.
So if you aren’t legitimately trying to get legal advice or help? Pound sand.
I have never used Slack and don't know anything about it, so it is hard for me to say. Are Slack messages accessible by third parties? If so, that can break A/C privilege. That is probably the main way it happens.
You still need to be careful with email too. Just because you are emailing a lawyer doesn't make it automatically privileged, though there is a much stronger presumption and argument for privilege. But, like, your plans to go to the bar with your lawyer buddy after work are not privileged, even if they are also your corporate counsel. It still needs to be related to legal advice, or in anticipation of litigation (which itself is a very large umbrella that gets you a lot of privilege for otherwise mundane corporate communications).
At any rate, a good counsellor will tell you what is safe and not safe. Be sure to take it seriously.
Slack is accessible by third parties in the same way that phone calls and emails are, namely that many employees of the companies that own the infrastructure can observe all of the communication but are told only to do so under very specific circumstances.
One obvious reason: there are pro-bono and state-provided attorneys, but they still retain the privilege with clients that don't pay.
There's no requirement for money to change hands, and the mere act of doing so doesn't create an attorney-client relationship where one doesn't otherwise exist.
If I'm understanding this correctly you proactively filter comms through an AI. If it detects you said something that could be interpreted a certain way the communication isn't sent and the user is told to be more careful in their phrasing?
That's pretty brilliant to be honest. Except maybe the discovery will then be on what the AI filter was instructed to prevent as if that's an admission of guilt.
There’s always a double jeopardy in legal monitoring. You have to adjudicate the risk of appearance in discovery and trial against the original risk you sought to moderate.
I absolutely think this is a good startup idea, and have been pondering building out a prototype.
I don’t love it, but in so many ways when you sit down and look at the alternative to it that isn’t tearing down or radically altering the existing legal system, it’s actually the better platform for the future.
Unfortunately there is a plethora of social control (and behavioral modification) issues intrinsic in this technology area, and like medical it requires some serious and open ethical exploration.
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.
Right, there's nothing odd or unfair here unless you're an anticompetitive company trying to get away with anticompetitive practices.
It's like saying that it's odd or unfair for someone to have "how to hide a dead body" in their search history as evidence against them while they're on trial for murder. But your honor, if I'm being penalized for researching how to hide the body, it's unfair because it makes it more likely that my murder will be discovered! Think of the chilling effect this will have on murderers, and the devastating economic repurcussions on manufacturers of bone saws and rubber hose!
Instructions to not _do_ things are conspicuously lacking from these trainings. We were instructed not to consider the legality of what we were doing, avoid using all the above language, and let the lawyers clean up afterwards if it's necessary. I think the only exceptions might have been export controls, copyright (loosely), and HR training (discrimination, etc.).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Legal privilege will not apply if your conversations with your attorney are for planning or furthering an ongoing crime or fraud, or one that hasn't happened yet.
> if your conversations with your attorney are for planning or furthering an ongoing crime or fraud
Sure. But that isn’t what’s going on here.
Every regulated industry has blackballed terms. Communicating that to ensure employees don’t accidentally trip up, as well as informing them of the laws they are meant to follow, is totally legitimate.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Unfortunately not trying hard isn’t illegal. Paying for placement is not illegal either, that’s pretty much what advertising is. And what Google will argue, in the case of websearch, is that the problem is hard which is what drives your perception that they have failed to maintain quality and switching is trivially easy, but no one does because.. the competition is worse. I daily drive Bing and in aggregate it’s approximately the same level of bad as google.
If you were to address the online advertising market, we would have a lot more to agree on. But you didn’t, and the article seems a bit confused about the ongoing cases (search filed in 2021 vs ads filed recently) and IMO is mostly written to rile the proles.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
? 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
> 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.
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.
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.
Doesnt the title imply using words monopolists use is evidence of something? Surely thats not what defines a monopoly. You’d have to look at actual actions.
Communications like this could arguably be about building culture, not evading antitrust allegations:
> "We don't 'lock up' or 'lock in' our customers," and "we do not 'leverage' anything," Google told employees.
But regardless, are they trapping customers and abusing some unique power that makes them a monopoly or not?
If you are saying things like "This would be a perfect murder weapon" and "I wish John Smith was dead" it will make you more likely to get convicted even if you are innocent.
Yeah, killing with intent is the very definition of murder. (Edit: Unlawfully) Killing someone without intent is manslaughter, with (generally) a much lighter punishment.
But to answer GP's question, AIUI, merely saying "Im going to murder this person?" does not make someone guilty of murder or attempted murder, or (perhaps surprisingly) even conspiracy to commit murder. Conspiracy usually requires an overt act, like buying a weapon, in addition to the statement of intent.
there's more nuance to the manslaughter than just killing without intent. you generally have to be doing something wrong in the first place to have it rise to criminality. ianal though and different localities judge it differently.
Not really. You can’t know if someone you never met killed someone after the fact so you rely on evidence. Some of which is what you say. The jury are regular people,
not logicians.
I agree with the sibling comment about what the point was, though of course you are technically correct as well, but in addition it might be relevant to mention that attempts at someone's life are also punishable. Whether the analogy continues to work for anti-monopoly law, I don't know
Many criminal trials have no direct evidence and are totally reliant on circumstantial evidence, so the statement above would be very detrimental to the defense.
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.
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).
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!
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.
From Google's perspective, it would be like be charged with murder because you told them to "go to hell", which proves your intent, even though in context, it was obviously a mundane argument.
"I know that you did it, so who cares that the evidence provided is questionable."
If you're 100% confident that they're guilty, you should have no problem with providing better evidence than, "an employee said a nono word" or "Google told their employees not to say a nono word."
100% agree. This speaking-in-code game is testament to the complete ineffectiveness of antitrust laws. I went through this training as well and it’s explicitly just about avoiding certain words and phrases. Meanwhile we have an industry where the norm is anti-competitive behavior and myopic dominance games. These rent-seeking monopolies aren’t created by accident.
Culture is based on what you actually do, not what you say. Volkswagen said they wanted to make cleaner cars, instead there was the emissions scandal. Most governments say they want to build new homes, not many houses get built.
> Doesnt the title imply using words monopolists use is evidence of something? Surely thats not what defines a monopoly. You’d have to look at actual actions.
Who says they're not both looking at what Google says and what it does?
Proving that Google both has questionable practices and tries to hide them is an argument that Google not only does questionable things but also that Google is aware it's doing questionable things.
This strongly reminds me of a scene from season 3 of The Wire. A bunch of gang leaders are making plans together -- by way of a meeting trying to be run by Robert's Rules of Order. A subordinate is taking notes -- have to have minutes according to the rules. Eventually the leader notices and asks "is you takin' notes on a criminal fuckin' conspiracy?"
It was a nice cooooop for as long as it was operational.
Bi'ness was abooming without any bloodshed.
---
On a more serious note, it is quite baffling to me that even after the tech sector embracing the corporate culture fully, and tons of documents generated every hour, prosecutors still have to scrape for such documents.
I feel like the single words referenced in the title are taken way out of context. The actual texts of these trainings unambiguously tell workers to not break the law, why the law is important, and what Google's philosophy is instead. That that includes not miscommunicating those intentions isn't a bad thing. None of this is ambiguous to anyone who has taken the actual trainings.
I worked at Google and I didn't get that impression. At no training I was told to not try to overtake the market, at many meetings PMs and directors were strategizing how to overtake the market, but the trainings were all about avoiding words (especially in writing) that could be seen as trying to establish the market dominance.
We've shifted too much in the direction of punishing based on words rather than actions.
Punishments should be driven primarily from actions and harms, and words should just be used to show intent and involvement.
It seems weird to me that the question of whether company X did something wrong is answered by its own employees' statements (based on their narrow perspective) rather than some objective criteria that something bad happened.
The reason they don’t want employees to use these words (and why they go OTR occasionally) is, at least as alleged by the government, to make discovery more difficult/impossible and also to hide/destroy evidence of their activity. It’s not about being word police, it’s about the reason why they’re policing language.
Do you not understand the basic principle of law that intention actually does matter? Or do you not understand that it may be difficult to prove that there was intention to commit a bad act even if it is trivial to establish that the bad act was made?
That's not a joke or something to take for granted. A lot of people in tech want law to be like a formal mathematics, and sort of pretend that's how it works, rather than acknowledge that fuzzy human things like "intention" are valid factors in legal matters.
This is great in theory, but in practice a lot of illegal acts (whether criminal or civilly illegal) hinges on intent, state of mind and the benchmark of the illusive “reasonable person”.
A simple criminal example is would be the difference between negligent homicide, manslaughter and murder. Which can be summed up respectively as lack of intent, lack of intent for outcome and intentional.
To suss this out you’d have to figure out the state of mind of the person in question and going over their communications is one of many ways to do this.
In the context of anti-trust this gets a bit more complicated but in a nutshell that is severely lacking the necessary nuance the difference comes down to getting ahead by legal pro-competitive means and getting ahead by illegal means.
To figure out if a company got ahead just because they had a great product (or got lucky) and based on that they had an organic market growth v. them getting ahead because they had access to means and methods they only derived from their size and market share in other markets, it’s important to look at communications to see what the intent behind decisions was.
This becomes increasingly more important when you’re dealing with a behemoth of a company where the lines between different departments and projects are blurred.
All of that is not even touching upon the fact that pretty much everything is an action, or act, even the choice of inaction.
Speaking, making a decision, not acting on knowledge, etc. They can all be considered acts.
To sum it up, intent is often a deciding element of an illegal act.
But if Google ends up being punished, it isn't because of these communications, it is because of what these communications prove in terms of the acts they are being prosecuted for.
The instructions and training given to employees is definitely relevant when determining intent, i.e. the question of whether Google systematically or accidentally destroyed evidence. No one is saying that the case is about words only. It is about anticompetitive behavior and the act of destroying evidence of it.
Can you imagine saying that with any other charge "It seems weird that Tom is being charged with murder just because the sister's victim claims that she discussed his death treats with her and not because we have objective proof of the murder"
In your analogy, you assume that you already know a murder happened, and it's a question of who did it. Obviously words matter there.
But for antitrust it's using words to try to show that a crime even happened at all.
That's definitely weirder -- more like if Tom said he killed Fred, but we don't really know who Fred is or whether he is alive or not, and we still put Tom on trial using a series of his statements.
I get where your coming from especially with this whole pronoun fiasco.
But on the other side of the coin very real bullying can come from just words.
Unfortunately what is real bullying and just harmless talk exists actually exists on a gradient so we can't really codify it into anything that seems reasonable. Most good judgements are arrived at by just intuition.
That would be interesting to discuss but it's not where I was going and it's a bit off topic.
Investigations should start with the crime and work backwards to find the criminal. If you have to find incriminating statements to tell if a crime has even happened, that is really a different thing.
Is anyone surprised by this? I'm reminded of two emails zuck was famous for sending. The first email incorporated the use of such banned verbiage. The second email, sent just a handful of minute later, seemed to speak to an imaginary jury, explaining why his last email was not anti-competitive nature.
I can only imagine some lawyer freaking out, dialing up zuck immediately, and dictating the followup email to write.
I don't think anybody is saying that you should have to go to jail for everytime you said something dumb! But if you are going to be acting anticompetitively, it sure is a dumb idea to send a memo about it--followup email or not.
I had that happen at a company. Somebody sent an email about an idea that violated an obscured federal law (the person who had the idea had no idea). The legal team basically dictated the reply to the email and actually copy-pasted the law as a response. "We can not implement this idea as it violated federal law ....."
I think it's wise not to discuss some things in a discoverable media because that media often ends up... getting discovered, and then all-too-often abused by lawyers, then tried in the court of public opinion. Very frequently there is missing context that leads to angry mobs over something somebody said in their email.
(I do accept that some people email things that are promoting something illegal, and those folks also learned to move to other media types)
Context matters:
Don't use these words because it might let others know that we're monopolists.
Don't use these words because we don't want to become monopolists, and if you use these words, it indicates that you might be doing something monopolistic.
Your second context is a bad idea. If you truly want to avoid monopolistic behavior, then you want to encourage your employees to talk about that behavior plainly; so that when they do attempt something monopolistic, you will know about it and react.
Regardless of guilt or not, using this kind of training as evidence against them seems asinine. If you don't have clear evidence and need to resort to this to try to win your case, why are you even filing the case?
My point is that it shouldn't *be* a piece of evidence, at least not for the Prosecution. Maybe the Defense could raise it as an example of them trying to be mindful of monopolistic behaviors and prevent them from taking root.
Your suggestion will result in a toxic workspace where anyone who does not like a product decision will simply say "Why do you want to hurt our users?", or even worse, "Why do you want to violate the law?"
Companies ask employees to refrain from discussing such stuff because most employees are not in a position to evaluate "Does this decision run afoul of antitrust laws?" (And maybe because they actually want to hide something, but in that case, we had better see actual evidences of the supposedly wrong behavior, instead of "Company X asked employees to avoid words that may cause expensive lawsuits.")
It's toxic for employees to say, "This is a bad thing we should explicitly avoid doing", and it's A-OK for employees to say, "Don't let anyone hear you say we are doing these bad things. If you must talk about these things, use different words, or you will draw critical attention to our behavior."?
Google: Don't use words that make it sound like we're doing illegal things, when taken out of context. If you have a genuine concern, talk to our legal department.
Your interpretation: "Don't let anyone hear you say we are doing these bad things."
I'd say I don't buy that. (Edit: sorry I worded by initial comment with too much snark. Speaking of toxic environment...)
For one thing, I could see the possibility that some part of Google may have engaged in unethical behavior. It might even have been at the C-level. It might have crossed the antitrust law, who knows. I have no idea.
On the other hand, I do believe that when Google was sending this message company-wide, pretty much everybody understood it as "Don't use these words because they can be taken out of context and then you're going to have a lot of pain," not "Don't use these words because then we cannot hide the unethical things we might be doing." I was there at Google.
I really believe that. From everything I've seen, Google consistently does the right thing with regards to avoiding search lock-in, and is substantially above the industry standard in doing so. Just try changing the default search engine in Chrome vs. Edge!
But then you still have the original problem: it's illegal to say the words, but it's also illegal to tell people not to say the words? You already know that there's explicit precedent that these words are considered indicative of illegal behavior, and you're just supposed to ignore that information in your effort to comply with the law?
It's illegal to do the things that those words describe. The actions are the problem, not the words. If you stop doing the thing, you naturally won't send emails saying you're doing the thing.
>If you stop doing the thing, you naturally won't send emails saying you're doing the thing.
This is equivalent to "if you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide". People speak imprecisely all the time. People also say things all the time that are correct and only describe legal behavior, but sound bad if taken out of context by a prosecutor out to get the company.
> This is equivalent to "if you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide".
How is it? That's an argument about privacy, not about whether something looks illegal.
> People speak imprecisely all the time. People also say things all the time that are correct and only describe legal behavior, but sound bad if taken out of context by a prosecutor out to get the company.
Indeed. I've worked for several and my recollection is that cautions around both what you do and how you talk about things that may be sensitive to regulators (like antitrust, export controls, etc.,) were present in the annual mandatory business conduct training at all of them.
The financial sector has a bunch of regulations on internal communication (mostly around retention and availability), but others don't really, so "explicitly told not to do this" seems like a misrepresentation.
You said you work at Google, so open the docs for network QoS. Find the section explaining the difference between AF3 and AF4. Does it still use the "captive" verbiage? Or have they rewritten it to sugarcoat that some customers are locked in with Google products, and they cut costs when they recognize that?
How stupid do you think the judicial system is to see internal networking terminology as an anti competitive thing? How stupid do you think the defendants lawyers are to not show that’s absurd?
Like, intent is a huge portion of the law.
I swear half the time here on HN I feel like I’m talking to robots that ignore context.
Google said “We do not lock up our customers” and not “We do lock them up but we can’t say that” or even “Just don’t use those words”. Reasonably the training instructed employees to “not lock up customers”.
I thought this was fairly well known.
I’m surprised Google et al. still don’t seem to have communications recording mandates for sensitive roles, like investment firms.
I agree with others that this sort of guidance is in no way proof of malfeasance but I can also see why it might arouse suspicion.
If a suspected mob boss is recorded telling members of their organization stop using words like "murder", "assassinate", and "intimidate" that would not be proof of a crime, maybe they are an upstanding business owner who simply wants their employees to stop using violent metaphors.
But it would be suspicious and seems reasonable for a prosecutor to bring up in court.
I feel like large companies no longer have any excuse for not storing all text communications for a decade or longer. Text is small. Storage is cheap. The idea that you just can't keep all these text messages is absurd.
A recent criminal case in Canada was thrown out because the police decided to turn off their body cam mics while they had a conversation of what they were going to do during their arrest of the accused. The judge decided it was suppression of evidence by the police. (I agree with the decision).
A CEO choosing not to record certain conversations is, in my view, not that far from different. It's taking active action to ensure there's no record when it would have been easier to have the record: a clear sign that they don't want someone to know that was said.
In an adversarial case like this, that seems to make sense.
The issue is that there are many, many groups that would happily sue a company to achieve a hostile objective (get access to proprietary insights, change public opinion, etc.) irrespective of the merits of their argument.
Accountability matters, but 100% observability and transparency do not automatically deliver it.
As a startup founder I tried, As many other founders have. In my circle we all learned the same lesson. Self-interested observers could pollute “the commons” very quickly and break the company culture.
Exactly, these companies spoiled just train these employees on not to break the law. It’s the drive to find an edge over competitors that’s making employees take these unethical behaviors. When they realize nobody’s watching, they’re more likely to act unethically.
A good comparison is the outrage that arises at speed cameras. People can’t believe that a camera could write a ticket for them. They’ll spoof and obscure license plates, take alternate routes, and try all sorts of things to avoid following the law. Just don’t speed and you’ll be ok. Don’t act unethically in business and you’ll be ok too.
>"Don’t act unethically in business and you’ll be ok too."
Easy to say, but the real world is full of grey areas, judgement calls, and interpretations. We don't have a law that says "don't act unethically" because it is way too broad. Regardless, you would still need a judge or a jury in order to make a verdict that unethical actions were taken.
Ethics is not something that requires written laws to understand. Acting ethically will avoid fines and penalties, but that’s not the purpose of acting ethically. Ethics is a superset of good laws. If laws were the only way to understand ethics we would be unable to define ethics, as you are getting at.
Here’s a good article from London talking about the grey area argument and where it leads and how to counter it at your company.
The article is published by Bloomberg, who uses their terminal licensing as leverage over customers' use of competing trading systems. If you want the terminal, you need to use their trading systems. Where are the stories about that?
Many of these words are terms of art in antitrust economics that also have common meanings (eg, 'bundle'). It seems uncontroversial to me that a company would want their employees to avoid using those terms.
I’ve been advised to use certain language in every company I’ve worked at. For example, I shouldn’t say a product “dominates” a market, it has a “competitive edge” or it “leads”. I’m not sure this is hiding evidence.
It's also possible you've only ever worked at companies that have been trying to obtain or abuse a dominant market position, rather than trying to compete fairly in the market...
This site spends a significant amount of bandwidth complaining about the problems of big tech, yet when people are actually trying to do something about it, the benefit of the doubt goes to the big tech companies.
In part because the prestige and “coolness factor” of these companies getting the better of people and in part because owning or using shit made by these companies evokes some weird sense of tribalism.
Also don’t underestimate the proliferation of the predominant American culture of capitalism in which very little is done to curb corporate free-for-alls.
This leads many to a mindset in which almost anything goes, especially when the harm is abstracted away due to complex economical forces.
Don’t worry, you’ll see most people here jump on the next thread complaining about the enshittifcation of services or the next price increase of their favorite product/service despite a lack of value add.
Turning history off is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. I personally remember a Google Legal executive saying that you just should not say some things electronically at all.
> "As far back as 2003, Google managers circulated unambiguous instructions on phrases to avoid to ensure they don’t come across like monopolists. ... Another internal presentation from March 2011, titled 'Antitrust Basics for Search Team,' tells employees:..."
This is an odd article from Bloomberg since they are reporting on events that happened 20-years ago.
I’m no google apologist but sometimes words are action. I remember them saying “we aren’t going to destroy our competition, we’re going to compete vigorously” words describe a plan, plans dictate actions. If you’re directing people to the language of competition you’re already better off than most monopolies.
Not saying google doesn’t need breaking up. But if justice department cues for anti-trust are words in marketing and pricing documents it’s a rather bad practice.
I don’t think there is anything illegal not using the words if you know the justice department is going to come after you.
> His goal was to help Google “maximize the opportunity” of rapid smartphone advancement [...] during a 2011 training called "Antitrust Basics for Search Team," Google also directed employees to "avoid metaphors involving wars or sports, winning, or losing."
Ah yes, "maximize the opportunity". I was wondering how all this wishy-washy generalized corporate-speak language starts, it's actively being taught.
> "We don't 'lock up' or 'lock in' our customers," and "we do not 'leverage' anything," Google told employees.
Eventually "maximize the opportunity" will be added to the list of banned phrases. What's next, invent completely new terms, resort to latin or other languages?
Criminal groups often invent new jargon so that the authorities, or strangers in general, can't understand what they are saying. So why shouldn't corporations do that? They can all learn something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenya and go from there. Prosecutors will never figure it out!
>What's next, invent completely new terms, resort to latin or other languages?
Worked for Pepys --
> Pepys was surprised by his wife as he embraced Deb Willet; he writes that his wife "coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con [with] my hand sub [under] su [her] coats..."
I fiercely despise Google and want them to go out of business legitimately, but this argument is right up there with “the defendant used encryption, that proves they must have child porn on their computer Your Honor!”
It is not the responsibility of any company to make it easier for prosecutors to CTRL-F their emails to indict them, especially given how prosecutors can and will go on fishing expeditions.
Using encryption is not uncommon. This particular use of language may be uncommon (I don't know if it is, that's something for the prosecution to demonstrate). So if it is, the equivalent metaphor would be some extraordinary lengths taken to conceal data, like perhaps "The police found empty bags that once contained powdered iron oxide and aluminium in the defendant's house, their desktop computer was found to have recently been moved and contained more SATA connectors than necessary for the components it contained, and there was a suspicious number of melted computer parts and HDD caddy screws in their garbage."
I’m a broken record at this point but… As arguably THE community leading the zeitgeist, we need to be having serious and sober conversations about the limits of capitalism.
How are we ensuring a healthy long lasting multi century society? We need to start implementing alternatives because even what were supposed to be the “good guys” are just another set of idealists and optimists ground into cynical dust.
It’s nearly deterministic that a “successful” venture > ipo > investor focused corporate trajectory has no conclusion other than to eventually consume itself and harm people as they chase margins for investors as THE core goal.
These are the cold sores of the antisocial margin chasing greed embedded in the structure of commerce and politics in which we live.
Who else wants to help turn this ship?
That memo and others from 2009 and 2011, the DOJ argued, made it clear that Google knew it needed "to be sensitive about antitrust considerations" and allegedly worked to hide any sketchy-sounding activity that could trigger antitrust scrutiny.
It's kind of weird that the price of being successful is getting sued for monopolistic behavior. If Google had gone the way of Yahoo!, no lawsuit. If you think your company will make it big, then you have to be conscious about how lawyers will interpret your words many years after the fact.
> Being successful is ok. Exploiting your success to prevent others from being successful is not
Any entity builds on previous successes to continue existing. Given that exclusivity agreements exist, how can a company be both successful and not monopolistic? It doesn't seem fair to say "lets look at what you did before you were successful, which was legal at the time, but becomes illegal if you are too good at it."
I don't think the problem is they were successful, I think the problem is more that they are using their success to effectively lock down the entire internet until only their approved platforms are allowed.
To what does the comment refer? Last I checked, Google has not "effectively lock[ed] down the entire internet until only their approved platforms are allowed."
This case seems like a joke. Seems very "damn if you do and damn if you dont" across the board. DOJ states that Google trains to not use monopolistic language for the very same reason as to what they are trying to be held liable of doing. Seems like it would be a recipe for disaster to save the chats between employees and execs. Holding people accountable word for word that they have in the midst of conversation seems unjust to begin with. . People say things without thinking entirely through- its chat! And the huge bids to be the default browser on phone is the nature of business set forth by the likes of the phone manufactures to begin with. The idea of their being a default search to begin with is the problem. GOOGLE is just playing the game. It shoudl be required that the search engine should be picked at the time of the unboxing of the phone and this rule probably should have been made 15 years ago. The whole case seems like a huge waste of time to me and is another example of the government demonstrating their incompetence with regards to big tech.
