[HN Gopher] Google's lawyer accidentally made a sensitive docume...
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Google's lawyer accidentally made a sensitive document public
Author : PretzelFisch
Score : 348 points
Date : 2021-04-11 13:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattstoller.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattstoller.substack.com)
| wpietri wrote:
| Ooh, this is a great point: "there is reason to believe that the
| further the government is willing to go in its statutory
| definition of publicity the greater likelihood is there that it
| may be excused from the necessity of exercising direct
| administrative control." -- Henry Adams
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams
|
| I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns should be
| public, just like the way 990 forms from nonprofits are. Sunlight
| is the best disinfectant.
| ajcp wrote:
| And publicity is a known remedy for social and industrial
| diseases.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "In a response to the complaint of a group of state attorney
| generals, Google's lawyers - Paul Yetter at Yetter Coleman -
| filed a response, but accidentally forgot to redact critical
| information. So now we know a few important new details about
| the Texas adtech case. This case includes an allegation that
| Google's large online advertising marketplace - think stock
| market but instead of stocks they trade ad slots - is riddled
| with secret rigged auctions."
|
| Do we have journalists to thank for this "public knowledge".
| They obtained copies of the response before Google discovered
| the mistake. Otherwise how would we know. The judge has since
| allowed Google to redact and re-file the response. The redacted
| details will not be (accidentally) public anymore. Is the
| government going to be able to use those redacted details in
| its case.
|
| Personally I think any litigation against FAANG, regardless of
| whether it "succeeds", is the best way the public is going to
| learn what these companies are actually getting up to, assuming
| the cases make it to the discovery stage. That is only because,
| IME, companies generally comply with legal discovery, no matter
| how liable or guilty they may be. It is remarkable what you can
| learn. So I say thank you to the journalists covering these
| cases and reviewing what is filed.
| robomartin wrote:
| > I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns
| should be public
|
| This is the sort of thing that sounds interesting but would be
| an absolute disaster. This is particularly true in the context
| of a globally competitive marketplace.
|
| Simple example: If I want to enter your market and know your
| exact cost structure, sales, etc. I can engineer a viable
| competitive entry, secure IP and financing/investment come into
| the market and destroy you. If, for example, I know your
| margins are running very thin and funds low, I can squeeze you
| out of existence.
|
| Put in simpler terms, this is the reason you don't tell your
| opponent what you are thinking and what your strategy and
| concerns might be during (and even after) a chess game.
|
| Same reason armies don't publish their battle plans either.
| Business isn't a vacation in paradise. Every single competitor
| (and other actors) is actively trying to kill you. If they are
| not, they aren't a real competitor.
|
| Public corporations are a very different story. Until the
| advent of SPACs (aka: Ponzi Scheme) a company was very careful
| about when to go public and had to achieve a certain mass and
| scale to be able to justify and endure the scrutiny and
| exposure.
|
| The world of successful businesses is paved with stories from
| entrepreneurs and companies who went to the very edge of
| insolvency in pursuit of a dream, mission or objective and came
| out of the other end with a massive success.
| vidarh wrote:
| In no country I've been involved in filing corporate tax
| returns would the tax returns reveal the level of detail you
| worry about.
|
| Notably they'd reveal less than the accounts I'm already
| having to file, that are public in lots of countries.
| wpietri wrote:
| This seems quite extreme to me. Do a lot of companies put
| "what you are thinking and what your strategy and concerns
| might be" in their tax returns?
|
| The truth is that in any mature industry, companies have a
| very good idea of each other's "exact cost structure, sales,
| etc". Talk with a restaurateur about the competition, for
| example, and they'll be able tell you in great detail about
| how they operate. The sale prices are right on the menu.
| They're buying from the same suppliers, hiring from the same
| labor pool. And anybody can figure out how busy they are with
| a a quick look in the windows. But restaurants are somehow
| not "an absolute disaster".
|
| And of course you're focused here on empathy for
| corporations. But the whole theory of functioning
| marketplaces is that companies shouldn't be comfortable. It's
| best for the world when they compete vigorously.
| toss1 wrote:
| It has always seemed to me that corps should be taxed on the
| greater of 1) their tax return profits or 2) their publicly
| reported profits to the markets.
|
| When major public corporations are paying zero or near-zero tax
| rates, one of those figures is blatantly misleading.
|
| Allowing secret and offshore books for taxes is a farce, and
| damages every other taxpayer, especially the smaller businesses
| and startups that lack the funding or scale to take advantage
| of the tons of loopholes available to larger and transnational
| corps.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Much of the spread between 1 and 2 are either jurisdiction or
| time based. Time-based seems 100% reasonable to allow the
| current spread. If you build a business over a decade,
| incurring losses along the way, it seems entirely reasonable
| to get credit for those losses when you first start making
| profits.
|
| Jurisdictional differences are more subtle or complicated.
| Certainly, we wouldn't expect a company to pay taxes to every
| jurisdiction on its entire global profits. So, we presumably
| must allow some kind of apportionment of profits to different
| jurisdictions and then the question becomes how to do so.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Wouldn't this put US registered corporations at a disadvantage
| by allowing foreign competitors to analyze their cost
| structures and finding their weaknesses?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Sure. But is that sufficiently bad? Minimum wage laws, health
| and safety laws, and all sorts of other regulations put US
| corporations at a disadvantage on the world stage. The state
| shouldn't just exist to make our corporations as profitable
| as possible.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Make foreign corporations do the same thing if they want to
| sell to US consumers
| totalZero wrote:
| Two sides to that coin. It would attract investment because
| shareholders want to know what they're paying for.
|
| Also, what you're describing would foster competition because
| other companies would be better able to identify profit
| centers.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Competition is good for consumers, that's why we want to
| encourage it. If your business model is undermined by people
| understanding it, you've got a problem anyway.
| natchy wrote:
| > Competition is good for consumers
|
| On the whole, yes, but not for all consumers.
|
| If some people lived near a beautiful meadow and river, and
| everyone else lived in the desert, then competition (e.g.
| opening up a direct train to the meadow) would hurt the
| ones living in the meadow.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Competition is usually good for consumers. It's not a law,
| though. Sometimes competition results in worse outcomes.
| 8note wrote:
| That sounds like the right thing to do? You should only be
| profitable if you make constant improvements. The constant
| need for improvements is why we use capitalism at all. If
| you're going to stagnate and stay profitable by hiding your
| process, it might as well be run cheaper by the government
| robomartin wrote:
| You've never run a (non-trivial) business, have you?
|
| Some of the things I read on HN are jaw-droppers. Then I
| remember that people these days confuse opinion and lack of
| context with facts and reality.
|
| My wife often repeats a saying that goes something like
| this: Your Google search isn't equivalent to my medical
| degree, residency and decades of experience afterwards.
| grumple wrote:
| On the other hand, sometimes your Google search can help
| a doctor in their analysis. An informed patient will get
| better treatment than an uninformed one; you must be your
| own healthcare advocate. And for anything nontrivial,
| this is why second opinions are a must. It would also be
| interesting if we lived in a world where case complexity
| and outcomes for doctors and various diagnoses/operations
| were published as well, so we can see how everyone really
| holds up competitively.
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| I've run a non-trivial business that depended on secrecy,
| and I recognize some of the ideas from the guy above. I
| wouldn't say "just let the government run this hedge
| fund", but there's some truth to what he's saying.
|
| I think it's also important that people can make comments
| on large social issues such as corporate transparency
| without feeling like they need to be experts. In fact,
| nobody can be an expert on these sweeping issues, because
| these laws affect such a wide variety of entities.
|
| I don't think the doctor comparison holds water. With a
| lot of work, someone can be recognized as a medical
| expert, but it's still a specific field that one can be
| qualified in.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > Your Google search isn't equivalent to my medical
| degree, residency and decades of experience afterwards.
|
| Agreed, though I see the value of expertise partly in how
| it allows those with it to explain why they see things
| differently, rather than simply point out that they know
| more.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >You should only be profitable if you make constant
| improvements.
|
| What? You should be profitable if you provide a good or
| service that people want for a price they can pay. If
| you're not profitable, you'll go out of business. The idea
| that you must always be improving can be really, really
| negative.
|
| >If you're going to stagnate and stay profitable by hiding
| your process, it might as well be run cheaper by the
| government
|
| Sure, the government should take over running KFC because
| they won't publicize the herbs and spices.
|
| These are ridiculous statements.
| m463 wrote:
| If you take the long view, would the transparency push
| foreign governments to change to keep up?
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| As an aside, I hate the expression that "Sunlight is the best
| disinfectant" because it's just not true.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Throw some biological matter into the sun, and it'll be
| sterile before it gets there. So _technically_ ...
| wpietri wrote:
| Depends on the heuristic for "best". It's widely available,
| reasonably effective, and 100% free, which seems pretty good
| to me.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, power wants to act surreptitiously because that minimizes
| both reputational damage and potential resistance, and
| transparency is a natural counter to that.
|
| i'm a strong proponent that transparency should increase
| superlinearly with power, which is something that our framers
| (in the US) had approximated, but never made particularly
| explicit. the average individual has a substantial right to
| privacy, basically having much autonomy to control information
| disseminated about themselves.
|
| on the other end, the average multinational conglomerate should
| have basically no privacy, for the company itself, its owners,
| and its management, as well as its political & commercial
| transactions. of course you'd have to be careful of the privacy
| rights of customers and suppliers (who'd also have varying
| transparency levels for themselves), but those could be
| anonymized. the neat aspect of that is that only larger
| entities would tend to be susceptible to being deanonymized
| through transaction pattern analysis, which is fine, since
| larger entities require more transparency anyway.
|
| in between are powerful individuals (full politicoeconomic
| transparency required) and small businesses (little
| transparency required).
| contravariant wrote:
| I know it's not a popular term in the U.S. but the socialist
| answer would be that companies serve the public and should
| therefore make information freely available unless there's a
| good reason not to.
|
| For the same reason companies shouldn't get to keep or
| distribute information on the very people they're supposed to
| be serving (unless there's a good reason to).
|
| So rather than transparency increasing with power, you could
| also say that the lack of transparency itself is placing
| powers in the exact opposite place of where it should be.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
|
| For me, right to privacy declines with impact to others. What
| you're doing alone in your house? Don't care. Between
| consenting adults? I almost don't care, except when public
| health matters (e.g., STDs, or COVID contact tracing). but
| the more we move toward public impact, the more I think
| there's a public right to know.
|
| Another way to look at it is that people have a right to
| _privacy_ , but not _secrecy_. Me lending my brother some
| money is reasonably seen as private. Me giving the same
| amount of money to a legislator as a bribe is something I
| might want to keep secret, but given the public impact, can
| 't really be called private.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't find what happens between consenting adults to have
| a compelling STD-related public health reason to breach
| privacy. If you do, could you expand on why you think that?
| ma2rten wrote:
| I wouldn't take what someone says on substack at face value. Does
| anyone know if the unredacted document is available somewhere?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Matt Stoller is an expert in the field of antitrust, feel free
| to look him up.
| lupire wrote:
| The auction part of this sounds like what people say rock bands
| and Nvidia should do: raise prices to make supply match demand
| and cut scalpers out of the loop.
|
| BTW, the OP is a copyright-dodging paywall-bypassing rehash of a
| WSJ article https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-
| bernanke...
| lordnacho wrote:
| A position I've come to via free markets is public information.
|
| If you look at economic inefficiency, a lot of models depend on
| some kind of information problem, eg the famous lemon cars.
|
| Consequently, I think far more of how society works should be
| made public:
|
| - Actual incomes from various sources. Maybe anonymize it, but
| I've looked up my Norwegian friends' incomes and it hasn't caused
| a revolution or an epidemic of kidnappings yet. X person is a
| doctor, he needs a 10 year degree to do that, he get paid PS120k,
| he gets this much pension, these are his working hours. Again, as
| you grow up you find out some of this but it's very not easy to
| find, especially when you're deciding.
|
| - Actual business models. "We provide a search engine, where we
| dynamically auction off advertising space, it makes x amount of
| money, and we thin y and z are critical to our profitability.
| Here's book about how it works." To some degree we know this
| about certain large businesses, but apart from the huge firms
| whose models have Ben Thompson writing about them, it's not
| actually that easy. It should be easy for everyone who's
| graduated high school to find out how the largest 10k firms in
| the country operate, so that people can think about how to
| improve things.
|
| - Actual business models, part 2. "We make x millions from y
| thousand widgets, which we sell to these people. Our suppliers
| are these firms, and we paid this much to them." Which again is
| one of those things where you can say "Google pays Apple to be
| default" but I also want to know if there's some other
| relationship that maybe I could get my company into. Or it may be
| that there's some social negative such as monopoly that we want
| to know sooner rather than later.
|
| - A who-owns-what database that doesn't have anonymizing entities
| in it. How will we know how society works if we don't have this?
| There's no way to know who has an interest in what without this.
| Again, you can say "kidnappings" but there's got to be some
| middle ground here. It's also a bit strange for society's major
| legal invention, property law, to work in favor of people when
| they ask for it, but the rest of the time society doesn't know
| who it is protecting. I'm no expert but you'd think a sane system
| would say "so-and-so owns this land, and in exchange for a bit of
| tax we'll make sure they can use it as they see fit".
|
| - Government needs to be transparent. People already believe
| this, it's just quite hard and boring to get done. But for
| instance David Cameron trying to lobby his old mates, it's a
| great thing that we can see it.
|
| As for this specific article, the interesting thing is that if
| ads were traded on a security market, a whole can of worms would
| be opened. We discovered a long time ago that it's bad to favor
| certain participants, so some stringent rules were put in place
| regarding fairness. But if I make a market for some other thing
| and behave the same way, it's not nearly as serious. I mean sure
| maybe they'll get done for this, but will it be proportional to
| the harm? Write to me when they're broken up, as the LSE would be
| if they made a principal business that front-runs the customers.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I've always thought it would be cool if there was a
| "declassification" period for commercial contracts. Any
| contract has to be escrowed to be enforceable, and after N
| years the contract is made public, possibly with names
| redacted. This would help everyone understand what types of
| business relationship are possible, which are common, etc.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Humm remember when Google's confidential commercial information
| about Android "accidentally" leaked most likely through the
| opposing council that time https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-
| leaked-android-numbers...
| stefan_ wrote:
| This has the redacted document:
|
| https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1381057389265321989
|
| So you can see they redact "Bernanke" as in "Project Bernanke".
| Why? What possible trade secret is there involved in naming
| something after a guy that never worked for you? What kind of
| judge acquiesces to this bullshit?
|
| Where is Alsup to tell these clowns to no more redactions?
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Search Bernake Helicopter Money, so it could imply that Google
| thinks this project is so profitable that money will be falling
| from the sky or maybe Google thinks it is a license to print
| money, like the the 'Fed and the money printers go brrrrrrrr'
| meme.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is a very small niche meme, and most of the "money
| printers go brrr" stuff is meme-ing post March 2020, when
| people didn't understand why the markets didn't go down.
|
| Certainly, it's a reference to central banking, I doubt it is
| to this meme.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Several years ago, a person deep inside GOOG told me that
| the company had a secret knob that they could turn to
| increase revenues. He didn't go into details, but I
| concluded that it had something to do with the ad auction
| pricing. This could be that "dial".
|
| Perhaps it's just a reference to Fed policy snoozery, but
| the helicopter connection seems like a better fit to me.
| lupire wrote:
| Raising prices isn't really a "secret knob".
| extropy wrote:
| It is however very suspicious knob if most of the
| spending is automated.
|
| To attempt an anology, consider if all phone calls where
| charged by the minute and there is a knob to adjust the
| pricing.
|
| One cal argue it's a reasonable tool to have. You can
| turn the knob up to "print money". Or you can turn it up
| to survive in a time when number of phone calls goes
| significantly down and you need to cover the fixed
| expenses.
|
| If the price is too low you are leaving money on the
| table. If the price is too high users will see the costs
| surpassing the benefits and move to other products. Why
| not take all the money the market will bear?
| toast0 wrote:
| I'm sure they could adjust the auction pricing, but they
| could also increase the size of ads (either more ads, or
| bigger text) on the search result page (or other high
| traffic pages). Many moons ago, at Yahoo Travel we had a
| few requests to boost revenue near the end of the
| quarter; adding a third text ad works, but you don't
| really want to keep it because it reduces the utility of
| the page.
| 0xDEEPFAC wrote:
| When Bernanke made the speech in 2016 where he invented the
| idea of a helicopter dropping money it was pretty much
| instantly a meme... everyone in the finance community knew
| about it because of how ridicules it sounded
| randallsquared wrote:
| The real heyday of this was early 2000s, after Bernanke
| used it in a speech the first time. Maybe he mentioned it
| again in 2016?
| joelwilliamson wrote:
| Bernanke used it in a speech for the first time in 2002,
| but it was coined back in 1969 by Milton Friedman.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money
| lupire wrote:
| And Friedman was referring to 1930s Keynsian ideas about
| stimulus. Keynes's original version was paying people to
| needlessly smash rocks.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Because the name "Bernanke" sounds like one is thumbing their
| nose at the central bank. Merely not a good look!
| koheripbal wrote:
| Judges do not approve redactions. Parties redact things in the
| documents they produce, and then the other side has to
| challenge them in court to get the unredacted version.
|
| ...but since such challenges are costly and time consuming -
| typically they aren't done.
| cycomanic wrote:
| So will there be criminal charges brought. I highly doubt it.
| That is typically the problem, a normal person gets the book
| thrown at them (even if they e.g. commit a crime accidentally),
| while nobody goes after the big guys because it is deemed to be
| too expensive or some other reason.
| dls2016 wrote:
| Don't worry... She will be pulled over, peppered sprayed and
| held 3 months without a hearing.
| bendergarcia wrote:
| It's sad, even the place that is supposed to be fair isn't due
| to money. Money rules too many of America's systems. But I have
| a feeling that money will always find a way to be influential.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > even the place that is supposed to be fair isn't due to
| money
|
| What place is that?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Money is just a proxy for power. Power is synonymous with
| influence.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| There are plenty of influential broke people. Just look at
| YouTube.
| [deleted]
| albatruss wrote:
| Exactly. That's why money is a proxy, not equivalent to
| power.
| bendergarcia wrote:
| A YouTuber cant use their likes to get the best lawyer
| can they? Even if they can (promos), it still means the
| legal system is unfair. The ones who benefit the system
| the most benefit from it.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Influencers can easily raise hundreds of thousands to
| fight legal cases if they have an audience that cares
| about their cause.
|
| Edit: s/YouTubers/Influencers
| luckylion wrote:
| And they can turn that influence into money very quickly.
| They might lose some of it when they cash in (or sell
| out), but it's pretty convertable.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And the conversion rate is good at quantifying how much
| actual influence a person has. Which may be less than
| they think.
|
| How much influence a typical YouTuber with 10k
| subscribers have? Very little, actually - they can affect
| audience's thinking in a limited domain, or get them to
| buy some stuff to a limited degree. All restricted to how
| much a cohort of volunteers cares about what their
| entertainers tell them.
|
| Contrast that with a person wielding a $100. They can
| literally get someone to do almost anything for them for
| a couple of hours. Or, in general, they can exchange it
| for $100 worth of goods and services provided by an
| industrial civilization. That's what hard influence looks
| like.
| busterarm wrote:
| That's exactly it. Rich people have the resources to fight for
| longer than you will hold your office.
|
| There's a really eye opening report 2 years ago from Charles
| Rettig, commissioner of the IRS, where he openly states that
| his agency focuses audits on poorer people, because they have
| less resources to fight and are more likely to just pay up and
| move on. Most of the audit resources are targeted at people
| claiming the earned income tax credit.
| adventured wrote:
| Edit: I provided actual data - facts - straight from the IRS.
| If you're going to downvote, I dare you to bring something to
| the table to counter reality (good luck).
|
| > where he openly states that his agency focuses audits on
| poorer people
|
| As incomes rise, audit % rates rise. The IRS does not focus a
| large share of its energy on poorer people. The people
| earning under $50,000 per year have a very low audit rate,
| and that's straight from the IRS data. Once your income
| climbs over $200,000 your audit rate begins to skyrocket.
|
| In terms of volume, 60% of all filers are at $50,000 or
| lower, so obviously even at a low % of audits they're still
| going to have a lot of audits. The IRS does audit people
| filing as having no income at a relatively high rate, because
| that category frequently attempts to use incorrect deductions
| to try to hide income. The rate of fraud is very high in that
| category.
|
| Here:
|
| https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2017ntf-
| irsauditstriggers.pd...
|
| "The majority of audited returns are for taxpayers who earn
| $500,000 a year or more, and most of them had incomes of over
| $1 million. These are the only income ranges that were
| subject to more than a 1% chance of an audit in 2018. " --
| [note: the $500k+ group is the majority of audited returns
| despite the fact that they're a tiny share of all returns,
| which tells you how low the audit rate is for the poorer
| categories.]
|
| "According to IRS statistics, you're safest if you report
| income in the neighborhood of $25,000 to $200,000. These
| taxpayers were audited the least in 2016."
|
| https://www.thebalance.com/top-audit-triggers-that-catch-
| irs...
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Not sure if others but I found your comment is an unfair
| characterization of what Rettig said, the from him is...
|
| ' the most efficient use of available IRS examination
| resources'
|
| The IRS has less resources so, it is not directly targeting
| those with less resources like you are attributing to
| Rettig. The IRS is targeting the most fraudulent schemes
| where it can effectively recover, based in its staffing and
| budget level.
|
| Here is the report from the IRS on this...
|
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6430680-Document-20
| 1...
| maxerickson wrote:
| If you are gonna get the vapors, maybe post IRS data that
| covers the period it has been administered by Rettig,
| instead of a report coming in at the tail of the previous
| administration?
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-
| ameri...
|
| So that story does basically say that the EITC audits don't
| cost a lot, but it also doesn't say if they are worthwhile,
| and it says that the wealthy are getting audited less and
| less.
| jellicle wrote:
| > The IRS does not focus a large share of its energy on
| poorer people.
|
| This is just untrue. In 2021, almost all of the IRS'
| enforcement energy is focused on poor people. This is
| continuing a trend that has gone on for 30+ years now of
| steadily reducing enforcement on the rich and holding it
| steady or increasing it on the poor, particularly aiming at
| anyone who claims the Earned Income Tax Credit.
|
| The IRS audits _half_ as many people as it did just five
| years ago. It audits _1 /5th_ as many people as it did in
| the 1970s. And these cuts have applied mainly to the top
| end of the income spectrum. Somehow it passed without much
| public notice that Trump's budgets massively slashed an
| already severely underfunded IRS.
|
| In fact, the IRS has now _ceased reporting_ its audit rates
| of the rich and large corporations, because they 're so
| low, so we no longer even know how low they are.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/has-the-irs-hit-bottom
| einpoklum wrote:
| Thank you for this. This seems to be of quite a lot of
| significance, and I've not heard it mentioned even on
| alternative media (although, granted, I'm not from the US
| so I don't follow as closely as a local would).
| [deleted]
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Here's what the OP was referring to.
|
| > On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is
| a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level
| employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who
| claim the earned income tax credit. The audits -- of which
| there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of
| the total the IRS conducted -- are done by mail and don't
| take too much staff time, either. They are "the most
| efficient use of available IRS examination resources,"
| Rettig's report says.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-
| ea...
| refenestrator wrote:
| A better characterization, from memory, was that they don't
| bother with the ultra-rich because it's difficult to win.
| 200k-1M is probably the danger zone.
| busterarm wrote:
| 39% of audits are people who claimed EITC...which only
| applies to low and moderate-low income workers.
| busterarm wrote:
| Otherwise read as "anyone who dare try to not be poor".
| Shivetya wrote:
| Sadly Congress isn't going to fix this because it requires a
| much simpler tax system instead of one that is filled from
| end to end with special carve outs and rules.
|
| When our current President subscribes to using tax law
| shenanigans to avoid paying taxes you can damn well bet much
| of the rest of Congress and high ranking state leaders will
| be found doing the same. One of the larger avenues of abuse
| is through S Corporations which let individuals shunt off
| income thereby avoiding certain types of taxes. It is also
| used by leadership of various charitable organizations to
| redirect money for purposes many would think fraudulent; like
| using them to buy homes for use by organization leadership or
| cover business jet ownership
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| Those who know the rules of a game and can play it well are
| often best suited to make good changes as long as
| incentives align.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| (Any links or direct quotes?that sounds more like
| interpretation than a report but I'd be curious to see! Thx)
| iudqnolq wrote:
| (not op). It's an essentially direct quote from the current
| head of the IRS.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-
| ea...
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And if someone gets charged it's the company which ends up
| paying a relatively small fine, since companies are people but
| we cannot send them to prison.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > but we cannot send them to prison.
|
| I think this belief is the problem. At the very least, a
| company has representatives; if it was to go to jail for a
| crime, then the C-suite or board could go in its place. A
| reasonable risk and form of accountability for the high
| rewards they already get.
|
| But I think it's fair to take it a step further: imprison the
| company. That is, apply any effects you would apply to a
| prisoner to that corporation. Lack of communication or direct
| control of assets and funds for the equivalent period of time
| for a start.
|
| Would that be existential, if not company ruining for any
| large length of time? Sure, just as it is for the average
| citizen. They'll lose many of the things they own, their jobs
| and livelihood and sometimes much more with any large prison
| sentence. Their loved ones and dependants' and acquaintances'
| lives are dramatically affected. So too can it be made the
| same for a company.
|
| The limit of limited liability should change with scale.
| adventured wrote:
| They should all be in prison, they're criminals. And this is
| likely just the lighter stuff, this is what they're getting
| caught doing that can be easily tied back back to them
| directly. Your high doubt is warranted, absolutely nothing will
| happen to the likes of Sandberg & Co., they're literally
| protected, representing the ultimate privileged class.
| Absolutely nobody will dare go near them.
|
| You also won't see the hundred billionaires Sergey Brin & Larry
| Page getting pulled in by the Feds and questioned over the
| various criminal activities at Google during their reign. They
| ran away, fled before the curtain came down, specifically to
| evade the risk of their actions coming back on them as the Feds
| & states start turning Google inside out and the scrutiny gets
| intense. It was left for Pichai to deal with.
| kodah wrote:
| > The court system is supposed to be a public accounting
|
| I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case
| public is a good thing. The public accountability should likely
| be based on judges (the participants) and whistleblowers with a
| solid burden of proof threshold. Court cases _do_ need to stay
| private in my mind.
| lakecresva wrote:
| > I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case
| public is a good thing.
|
| Well for one, the US has a common law legal system, so it's
| entirely dependent on the public availability of court cases.
| In terms of fairness, I think the current status quo is (in
| this limited respect) very reasonable; you're entitled to
| absolutely iron-clad privacy in the interactions which you pay
| for, which are your interactions with your attorney. When you
| start making use of public funds by bringing your dispute to
| the courts, the public has a right to know what it's money is
| being spent on and it has a right to know what's going on in
| the community. The vast majority of legal disputes are settled
| in state district courts, which are local in scope.
|
| I also don't think privacy mixes well with the degree to which
| the judiciary is uniquely unaccountable, though this is
| admittedly less and less relevant as time goes on since
| basically nobody in government is accountable for anything at
| this point.
| kodah wrote:
| I'm still not convinced accountability means that the public
| gets full view of everything. There's probably other ways to
| ensure that the public gets to know their money is not wasted
| without hearing and seeing every little detail.
| bawolff wrote:
| Why are they going on about tax returns? Doesnt seem like that's
| related to what was leaked.
| mettamage wrote:
| So can someone with some knowledge about Google's and Facebook's
| past give an idea on how legally and morally good/bad this is
| compared to previous things they did?
|
| It seems really bad, to the point that Black Mirror-esque things
| are simply a decade away.
|
| With that said, I don't know enough to draw that conclusion.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I think it's the same category as inflating conversions from
| the point of the advertiser (both are nasty, here it is more
| easy to prove criminal intent): if you are an ad buyer, make
| sure that you are adapting your bids and measure everything
| yourself.
| prepend wrote:
| Seems like Google's internal units were bidding up ad prices.
| Since no one can see that but Google, ad buyers didn't know
| they were paying higher prices.
|
| It could just be stupidity. Or bad policy. Or it could be
| systematic to maximize their as sales. Google's not stupid, so
| them allowing it means they were aware and will able to easily
| explain why it's not that big of a deal.
|
| It's like if eBay sellers had their subsidiaries bidding up
| prices on their items. And not disclosing. Maybe there's a good
| reason, probably just sneaky greed.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| If ebay did that, they might end up buying a whole lotta
| crap. This technique is not a money pit when information is
| available. I'm not clear on the information available to
| publishers, but I don't think its as clear as ebay. The
| legality is more subtle
| prepend wrote:
| Not if they used their proprietary data to bid up but never
| win auctions. Especially since they know other bidders max
| price willing. So bidding for max-1 would result in no
| wins, but lots of extra money.
|
| This would make me not use eBay. But there's really not an
| alternative for ad markets controlled by Google.
| fakedang wrote:
| eBay sellers don't control their marketplace nor do they have
| access to all the internal data that can influence purchasing
| decisions. Google controls its ad market fully.
| smt1 wrote:
| Reminds of wallstreet sell side firms front running their own
| clients.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Shill bidding is illegal in auctions. They've represented
| these ad markets as auctions, but it seems like they aren't.
| You're bidding against some machine designed to make you pay
| more.
|
| Can anyone offer a legit explanation.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| One possibility: Google creates a fully independent
| subsidiary that bids on AdSense auctions with a goal of
| turning a profit by reselling the slots they buy. This
| might make sense if Google sees large inefficiencies in the
| ad market that are being taken advantage of by third party
| resellers, at the expense of their customers. It's not a
| great look, but it could be done in a way that is
| aboveboard from a legal standpoint.
| luckylion wrote:
| That was the idea, wasn't it? Only they didn't make it
| independent, but gave it access to data that they didn't
| give to external bidders, because it would be less
| efficient (read: less profitable) if it had to act on
| public information.
| goldforever wrote:
| Only idiots believe this was accidental!
| EastSmith wrote:
| Google needs to be split in 4. Adsense, Adwords, Chrome and
| Android. Thank you.
| forgingahead wrote:
| WSJ article on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-
| project-bernanke...
| williesleg wrote:
| Hacker news!
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I know many like this sort of article, but I lost interest at
| "Henry Adams, one of the most important thinkers in the 19th
| century", because it promises that the article will blather on
| with philosophical arguments for a long time before actually
| revealing its point (and thus before showing whether it is worth
| to spend any time on it).
| andybak wrote:
| It was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to
| the point.
|
| I only know this because after reading the meat of the article
| and seeing your comment I went back to check.
|
| I had noticed the waffle the first time around because I'd skim
| read until I got to the relevant part.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > t was one, maybe one and a half paragraphs before it got to
| the point.
|
| Too much.
| andybak wrote:
| Not if you can skim read.
| the_local_host wrote:
| It was a single paragraph of historical context, I don't think
| that's uncalled for.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I think this heuristic is good, but specifically for
| identifying bad writing. You, me, and almost everyone here
| wants a straightforward account of what happened. The opening
| sentence is tone-deaf to what the readers want to learn.
|
| Also, the phrase "one of the most" is almost always indicative
| of poor writing, even if it is far better than using a
| superlative.
| cletus wrote:
| Similarly, I lost interest when I clicked a link to another of
| the author's posts talking about the FTC declining to sue
| Google in 2012 and it treated the claims of Yelp as gospel for
| proof of Google's anticompetitive behaviour.
|
| Yelp like to paint Google as the bogeyman because it distracts
| from the fact that Yelp hasn't changed in a decade and the
| product, well, sucks.
|
| The core claim here seems to be that Google is giving itself
| preferential pricing on impressions. Maybe that's.true? It's
| not clear to me what the effect of that is. I would've liked
| more detail about that and less grandstanding on the evils of
| Google, honestly.
| rhencke wrote:
| Except.. it didn't blather on at all, and got right to the
| point.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't post off-topic, shallow complaints to HN.
| They get upvoted to the top of the thread (it's basically a
| community bug) and then choke out interesting discussion.
|
| I've marked this one offtopic now, which puts it lower on the
| page.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| Every name that signed that document _ought_ to be criminally
| charged, though like other commenters, I find it unlikely. TANJ.
| gundmc wrote:
| Discussed 12 hours ago with 40+ comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26767088
| [deleted]
| perl4ever wrote:
| (2010)
|
| "...during the five minutes it took to draft and send the email,
| Google's Gmail email system automatically saved eight "snapshots"
| of the email and put the copies into the author's draft email
| folder. No action was required by the author. It was all done by
| the auto-save.
|
| When Google learned that it had inadvertently produced draft
| versions of the email to Oracle, it requested that Oracle return
| all copies. Oracle complied, but filed a motion to compel
| production of the draft and final versions of the email. Oracle
| successfully convinced the district court that the email was not
| protected by any privilege, and the court ordered the production
| of all versions of the email. Google sought a writ of mandamus to
| have the district court's ruling overturned, but the Court of
| Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied the writ."
|
| https://www.millercanfield.com/media/article/200378_MCNewsle...
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