[HN Gopher] Judge rules Google trial documents can be posted by ...
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Judge rules Google trial documents can be posted by U.S. online
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 313 points
Date : 2023-09-27 12:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [flagged]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Apologies, while the general dupe problem is annoying, it was
| misleading that the linked article shared 5 days ago was
| updated without notice to include the latest bloomberg info so
| it looks like it was news from 5 days ago.
| sophacles wrote:
| Im glad it got posted again, it's news to me. Sadly my life
| includes things other than browsing HN for the latest headline,
| so I occasionally miss news.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| that's fine if you miss it, you see this one, and the
| discussion is _over there_.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I appreciate the motivation of consolidating comments on a
| story.
|
| But... no the discussion isn't over there. There's only 4
| comments on that submission, and none of them are about the
| new ruling. What are you talking about?
|
| And from your other comment: > wanna keep it on the front
| page? keep upvoting the first post of it. Either way, we
| don't need ten threads of discussion.
|
| That post already died, it takes a new one to be on the
| front page now. The post we're on is the _only_ current
| discussion, and it 's the _only_ one on or near the front
| page.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| why does he even care so much anyway? he's all over this
| thread like he's losing ad money on the other one or
| something.
|
| It's also incredibly a-few-different-unflattering-words
| to attempt to declare where a conversation is happening.
|
| The conversation is wherever it is, and doesn't care
| where you think it is or wish it is.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| I care because it's becoming a bigger problem on here
| seeing the same stories posted over and over and over and
| discussion split into many threads, days apart etc.
| People serially submitting dupes like they're fresh news.
| It doesn't help the discussion and it doesn't help the
| experience on the site.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| [flagged]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Sorry it seems that arstechnica updated their article
| without any notice at the top to link the bloomberg piece
| etc. So it looked like it was _5 days old_ news. Damnit.
|
| The point stands when submitting dupes, direct the
| discussion to the ongoing threads.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But even if it had been the same news, it was 4 comments
| multiple days ago. That's not an ongoing thread.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Not a duplicate (maybe read the articles first?). And even if
| it is, keep this news on the front page until the end of the
| trial. It's by far the most important thing going on in the
| tech space right now, except maybe the anti-trust suit against
| Amazon (which should also be front-page every day once that
| trial starts)
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| wanna keep it on the front page? keep upvoting the first post
| of it. Either way, we don't need ten threads of discussion.
| naikrovek wrote:
| is it fun being an unpaid cop?
| jcranmer wrote:
| That article was about the judge being asked to rule whether or
| not the documents can be posted. It was updated today to
| reflect the _actual_ ruling that they could be posted. So not a
| dupe.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The second sentence of the above arstechnica article mentions
| the ruling and links the bloomberg report. The discussion is
| _over there_.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| The Amazon lawsuit is online as well and most of the interesting
| parts were redacted
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Were any other documents other than [1] released?
|
| [1]
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1910129AmazoneC...
| mlissner wrote:
| Lots. You can follow here: https://www.courtlistener.com/aler
| t/docket/new/?pacer_case_i...
|
| (I run CourtListener.)
| einpoklum wrote:
| What's the legal basis for the redaction? I mean, I assume
| legal proceedings in the US are public by default and only
| censored/privileged as specific exceptions.
| [deleted]
| imchillyb wrote:
| Your Honor, we object to this motion. These documents must not be
| released to the public.
|
| On what grounds?
|
| Because the documents really damage our case!
| djoldman wrote:
| https://archive.ph/TjqZ0
| ugexe wrote:
| Thanks Jerry, you've managed to finally get me to switch off
| google search for good! It seemed quite a difficult thing to do
| in the past, but finally something has clicked that made it feel
| like the natural thing to do.
| agentgumshoe wrote:
| Phew it's a real judge. The heading makes it sound like Google
| has some kind of self-appointed justice system in place!
|
| The cyberpunk Corpo future can wait a bit longer then...
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we moved Google judge to Google trial in the title above.
| Thanks.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| [flagged]
| gpderetta wrote:
| No need to worry, Google Judge[1] would be discontinued after a
| few years anyway.
|
| [1] some sort of AI arbitrator I guess?
| gpm wrote:
| Google Judge sounds like someones attempt to speedrun
| unethical uses for LLMs.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Or a great SNL skit.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Yes, Google Judge is getting phased out, but it's being
| replaced by YouTube Judge, which has 93% of the features. And
| you don't get ads in your subpoenas.
| tremon wrote:
| On the other hand, YouTube Judge has a list of pre-approved
| claimants and will automatically rule in favour of any
| entity on that list.
| TheCleric wrote:
| And I'm just receiving word that Google is announcing that
| have decided to shut down Google Judge in favor YouTube
| Judge.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| My favorite doc so far:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Damn. Am I reading this correctly? Jerry here is asking Anil to
| make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to
| make more queries so ads get more impressions? All because they
| decided to tie employee compensation to the whims of quarterly
| earnings reports. I at least understand why on that last piece,
| given any attempt at quantitatively estimating long-term value
| creation at the time of creation is effectively impossible.
| Still interesting to see the tail so explicitly wagging the
| dog, though, with a manager all but saying fuck the users, our
| salespeople need their bonuses.
|
| I'm not claiming I know an answer here, given Amazon's attempt
| at the opposite fuck employees, do everything possible to
| please customers hasn't really worked out, either.
|
| If the FTC and US court system have any backbone, I guess
| hopefully the answer is stop letting single companies get this
| powerful. The market can only help if there's actually a
| market.
|
| And I guess quit it with the mandatory return-to-office
| policies so your employees don't have to live in high cost of
| living areas and maybe missing a quarter or two's targets and
| having to take home 600k instead of 800k one year won't be
| life-destroying.
| yukkuri wrote:
| Some high cost of living areas wouldn't be without all the
| offices!
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| My take is that this all refers to another doc with that ITEM
| 7 in it. I think these are interface tweaks to Chrome that
| will drive more search volume, but negatively impact Chrome
| UX. Chrome team is pushing back, b/c they don't want their
| app to suck, but Ruth needs to hit her number.
| dublinben wrote:
| A great example of this is how they merged the search box
| into the address bar, to create the "omnibar." Since then,
| they've aggressively promoted submitting a new Google
| search for whatever you're typing in, instead of returning
| results from your local browser bookmarks, history, etc
| that wouldn't generate more ad impressions.
| Animats wrote:
| Which Firestorm had years ago, as the "awesome bar".
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Omnibar seems to be what this is about. At one point they
| note that there's a Reddit thread that thinks their a/b
| test is a bug.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| If I am reading this document correctly, the changes consists
| of rolling out new features such as mapping search terms to
| entities.
|
| While I understand the frustrations people have with Google
| search, these changes in itself don't seem that bad, although
| I do agree that pursuing revenue as your sole purpose
| definitely can lead you astray.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It's the philosophy behind them. Let's say Google Search
| improved relevance by showing less low quality sites.
| However what if those sites also showed a lot of Google
| Display Ads and thus generated a lot of ad revenue for
| Google versus other sites. Given this email it's very
| possible that such a change would get rolled back or
| discouraged due to the drop on Google revenue from it.
| jsnell wrote:
| If there had been such a change or a discussion about
| whether to make such a change, presumably that'd be what
| the DoJ would have used as evidence instead of this.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The DOJ can't magically pull out a time machine to record
| conversations that happened but were never written down.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a
| feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries.
| What feature it was is unclear from the email, since they
| never discuss it directly, but it was noted that users in
| the experiment were _asking if it was a bug in public_.
| Furthermore, the feature was newly added months prior.
|
| So if I'm following it correctly, the email boils down to
| "please revert $POPULAR_CHANGE because it makes us less
| money on search ads, but don't tell people that's why we're
| doing it!"
|
| (Someone who is a more diligent sleuth than I could
| probably figure out, but I don't know how to search Reddit
| for threads in ~April 2019 asking about bugs in Chrome
| related to features that launched ~October 2018.)
| jsnell wrote:
| > The critical thing that appears to have happened is
| that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search
| queries.
|
| Where are you getting there being a rollback? The
| earliest emails in the thread say there won't be a
| rollback, and the newest email asks for that decision to
| be reconsidered. Nowhere does it say that a rollback
| actually happened.
|
| (The reddit thread isn't about a rollback, it's about an
| ablation experiment on a small % of users.)
| jcranmer wrote:
| As I read it, the ablation experiment is the experiment
| seeing what would happen if they rolled back, rolled out
| on a small % of users.
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| > Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier
| on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get
| more impressions?
|
| As we've all noticed from the shittier Google results the
| last several years, this has been known. The surprising part
| is that this communication was not done over the phone or
| some other secretive non-transcripted way. At least this
| time. Amateur-hour on Jerry's part.
| defen wrote:
| > The surprising part is that this communication was not
| done over the phone or some other secretive non-
| transcripted way.
|
| That only works if the other party is already willing to do
| what you want. "I'll need that in writing" is the root
| password for avoiding these kinds of requests.
| hfjjbf wrote:
| [dead]
| DelightOne wrote:
| You mean users click more Ads when they are the only sane
| option besides the worse "normal search results"?
| lozenge wrote:
| Anil's on the Chrome team, they don't control search results.
| I think they are talking about increasing the address bar's
| preference to search instead of giving you local results
| (history and bookmarks). They could also be talking about
| specific queries, e.g. with Chrome's default settings, the
| address bar can answer some queries like weather or
| calculator using search without having to press Enter.
| badrequest wrote:
| "I care more about revenue than most people" is a very nice way
| to phrase "I don't give a rat's ass about the user, I want my
| money!"
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Not really his money if those numbers are not accurate you
| know
| jhp123 wrote:
| I'll summarize this for people who don't want to read through
| the PDF, or aren't familiar with the jargon.
|
| It's a discussion between two people, Jerry and Anil. Anil
| seems to be representing the Chrome team, and Jerry the Ads
| team and/or sales.
|
| 7 months prior, some feature related to Chrome's omnibox
| (url/search box) was rolled out, leading to reduced searches
| ("SQV"). Jerry is asking for this feature to be rolled back
| (undone) to restore lost revenue. Anil is trying to keep the
| feature by finding other ways to make up the lost revenue.
|
| Anil is opposed to rolling back the feature because it is a
| user-visible change that was approved by all parties and
| launched months ago, so it will be frustrating to users to lose
| the feature and to developers to see their work canned.
|
| Anil accelerates the launch of some other features to improve
| revenue, but Jerry is not satisfied. After some back and forth
| he sends the final email laying out his case: the revenue
| impact is too severe, sales is going to miss quota, quarterly
| earnings will be below forecast, stock price will decline,
| employees will lose out on stock-based compensation. This last
| email is cc'ed widely so I think Jerry was trying to build more
| pressure on Anil/Chrome team.
|
| edit: do read the pdf though, there's a lot more detail in it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really
| appreciated it giving me full context before reading the
| email exchange.
|
| It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs
| to be broken up than this. Honestly, I think it should
| basically be forbidden for Ads folks to even talk to the
| Chrome team. This looks like textbook abuse of monopoly power
| when you use your dominant position in one area (web
| browsing) to juice your position in another area (ads).
|
| Also, I think it shows the foolishness of any company
| thinking that "Don't be evil" is a position that can last
| over time as you grow. I know it's easy to look at Jerry as
| "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to
| his incentives ("if we don't make these changes, we miss our
| sales number, and if we miss our sales numbers, we don't get
| our bonus"). _All_ big companies eventually revert to their
| incentive structure once they become big enough. This line of
| thinking also goes to show why Google has traveled down the
| enshittification path so strongly over the past 5-10 years.
| Easy for to me imagine how each little search result change
| resulted in more revenue and not a significant number of
| people leaving, until you are left with the situation we have
| now where the _entire_ first page of any remotely commercial
| search is just ads, going directly against Google 's entire
| original thesis for their existence in the first place. My
| guess is the relatively recent change of text from "Ad" to
| "Sponsored" is because fewer people realize that sponsored
| means ad.
| fallingknife wrote:
| How is this any evidence that Google needs to be broken up?
| Google, like all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What
| about this is anti-competitive? Foolishness is not illegal.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Fortunately we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890,
| which _does_ make this behavior illegal.
|
| Leveraging your monopoly in one area to advance your
| position in another area _is_ illegal in the US, _even
| if_ the company got to their monopoly position in the
| first area by just having the best product.
|
| This is basically exactly what Microsoft was found guilty
| of in the late 90s: abusing their monopoly power in
| operating systems to advance their position in the
| Internet by making IE the default browser and insisting,
| despite all evidence to the contrary, that "The browser
| must be an integral part of the OS!"
| lazide wrote:
| That isn't what the Sherman antitrust act says.
|
| It says doing it 'unreasonably' (or to an 'unreasonable'
| extent) is illegal (regarding trade).
|
| Attempting to monopolize (or actually doing so) is
| illegal, but leaning on a subsidiary to stop hurting
| revenue for the overall entity isn't necessarily that (or
| illegal!). Monopolies based on actual quality are also
| generally considered okay (not illegal).
|
| If it was, any company with multiple divisions would be
| in violation.
|
| We'll see what the court determines here.
|
| Happy to provide a reference to the law if you want. It's
| pretty short.
|
| Edit: actually, FTC has a great write up - which also
| shows how difficult this case is when you look at other
| market participants and what Google was actually doing -
| https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-
| guidance/gui...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To clarify, when I said "Fortunately we have the Sherman
| Antitrust Act of 1890, which does make this behavior
| illegal" I was referring to the act and the century plus
| of case law around the act that solidified what it meant.
| With laws in the US it's pretty easy to point at any
| individual law and say "it doesn't actually say that" if
| you ignore all the jurisprudence that goes along with
| that law. E.g. The 1st amendment literally only applies
| to laws the US Congress can make, but centuries of
| following case law means that it now applies to
| essentially all governmental bodies in the US.
|
| I think the link you added is great in that it would seem
| trivial to rewrite that "Example: The Microsoft Case" and
| apply many of _those exact same rationales_ to what
| Google has done. I am _not_ saying the case is a total
| slam dunk, and I think it 's fine to argue some of the
| finer points (e.g. I'm sure there will be a lot of debate
| along what is described in that "Market Power" section to
| determine if Google has sufficient market power in
| search, ads or browsers), but I do strongly push back
| against the statement I was replying to, "Google, like
| all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What about this
| is anti-competitive?" If you can't see how what Google
| was doing was anti-competitive (whether or not it meets
| the threshold of deserving of a severe governmental
| solution), I feel like that's just being willfully
| obtuse.
| nojito wrote:
| It serves to show a pattern of behavior to protect a
| monopoly in ads. This examples show how they leveraged
| their monopoly of Chrome to protect their ads.
| fallingknife wrote:
| How is the described behavior leveraging Google's
| monopoly status? Making a product shittier to raise
| revenue is not specific to monopolies and not illegal.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google
| needs to be broken up than this._
|
| But it never happened -- the omnibox stayed -- so it
| doesn't seem like very good evidence to me. It actually
| shows the opposite -- that the product team built what was
| best for users _in spite of_ opposition from sales.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > But it never happened
|
| Oh something happened.
|
| Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail:
| https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-
| prioritizing-se...
|
| _tl;dr:_ Chrome started prioritizing previous searches
| over visited sites for suggestions in the omnibar.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > prioritizing previous searches over visited sites
|
| To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds
| like an attempt to keep people making google searches
| over and over merely to return to whatever search-result
| they already found in the past and wanted to see again.
|
| It's true that not everything in the browser-history is
| what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for
| "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-
| correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom,
| done, got it. Then if I want that information again
| tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed
| to just returning to the same result?
|
| In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a
| browser that is utterly focused on the _user 's_ best-
| interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it
| would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every
| time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop
| once you get to that same result... So you probably
| always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer
| it prominently to help you _avoid_ wasting time on
| unnecessary searches. "
| [deleted]
| rurp wrote:
| As others have pointed out something _did_ happen, but
| even if it hadn 't this exchange still highlights an
| serious issue. The fundamentals matter more than any
| single outcome and these tensions haven't gone anywhere.
| There must be countless other conflicts along these lines
| and it's unreasonable to expect a for-profit like Google
| to consistently act against its own short term financial
| interests.
| jltsiren wrote:
| > I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in
| this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives
|
| The way you react to incentives determines your moral
| character. If an action is harmful on its own, it doesn't
| become any less harmful if you also stand to gain from it.
|
| Companies are amoral and lack human agency, and hence they
| cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. The
| responsibility lies with the people making the decisions
| within the company. And not just the people on the top, but
| also the people making the day-to-day choices that
| transform the strategic decisions into reality.
|
| (See also: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
| of Evil)
| NegativeK wrote:
| People continue to parrot the phrase that corporations
| are typically beholden to their shareholders to maximize
| profit.
|
| We also know from the prison experiments that people have
| a really hard time not falling into evil behavior when
| it's expected.
|
| But I agree: neither of those facts absolve every
| individual in any organization anywhere from doing the
| wrong thing. Even if someone else would step in to your
| spot and do the wrong thing, it's still your
| responsibility.
| 22289d wrote:
| Remove the word monopoly from this and there is nothing
| wrong with it. It's standard and smart business practice to
| create synergies among your business units in this way.
| It's one of the key reasons companies acquire other
| companies.
|
| While I would agree that Google doing it may be detrimental
| to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it.
| They're just doing what any company would do. It's not
| their job to look out for the health of the market or
| what's best for consumers. That's the governments job. It's
| Google's job to look out for Google and their shareholders.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >it can be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly
| nefarious when they do it.
|
| That is more of a US than an EU point of view.
|
| US is more "If you're not a monopoly, feel free to fuck
| the customer"
|
| EU is more "Consumers have rights, quite being a dick".
| 22289d wrote:
| I'm not familiar with EU law but as a US consumer, I
| don't think that's fair. They're far from perfect but
| they try. We have entire agencies that exist to protect
| consumers in specific areas. The SEC being a famous one.
| Their entire mission is to protect investors from getting
| scammed. That's why congress created and funds the SEC.
| That's why those thousands of people go to work every
| day. To protect us from getting scammed. Awesome. I'm
| thankful for it.
|
| The context here is one particular type of fucking over
| the customer. The ways in which monopolies can abuse
| their power. Within that one specific type, what you said
| is probably accurate.
| deciplex wrote:
| Google's customer service is famously awful.
| ggm wrote:
| Only if you don't pay for it. if you pay for it, its
| average to normal.
|
| (I pay for 1 and I get what I pay for. People respond
| when I ask for help)
| solardev wrote:
| The SEC protects investors, not end customers/users. It's
| different. The EU has a bunch of consumer rights that
| apply to everyday people regardless of wealth.
|
| The US has very little of that, aside from the occasional
| recall. Instead, we have a predatory legal system that
| thrives on lawsuits instead of regulations.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Indeed, the GP's description of the situation is
| backwards. In the US, harming consumers is the surest way
| to lose an antitrust case. In the EU, they use regulatory
| powers to protect competitors, even when it harms
| consumers.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| How can chrome be broken off from the rest of google? It's
| not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox
| and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).
| fallingknife wrote:
| So now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct
| incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a
| good product since that's their revenue source too.
| to11mtm wrote:
| That would be a good thing if it drove people away...
|
| After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to
| me.
|
| I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the
| wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium
| clone...
| voytec wrote:
| > Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way
| Firefox and Safari do
|
| As in, Chrome decoupled from Google should have 90% of
| revenue coming from Google/Alphabet, as Mozilla does?
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| Bing could bid for it
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 90% < 100%. It is, at the very least, a start.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The world you are suggesting, where intermediary
| platforms take all of the revenue out of the information
| systems, would not be a good one.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Chrome/Blink shouldn't be broken off into a business, but
| into a nonprofit org. Lots of companies rely on both
| which should make funding a non-issue.
| jannes wrote:
| What would stop Google from simply forking Chrome again?
|
| Maybe Chromium development could be broken off into a
| non-profit, but Chrome is just some Google branding on
| top of the open source Chromium.
| UnlockedSecrets wrote:
| If it came to breaking up Alphabet, The courts would
| include in their orders terms that would prohibit them
| just picking the pieces back up.....
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Google search revenue seems to do ok for Mozilla although
| that's not the best solution.
| rurp wrote:
| Yes, exactly. Chrome dominates the browser market via
| money made monopolizing search ads.
| 22289d wrote:
| > It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue
| sources.
|
| Chrome makes a ton of money.
|
| Google pays Apple and others billions of dollars to be
| the default search engine in their browser. Google gets
| that free now from Chrome but they get the revenue from
| all of those searches. Google would need to pay Chrome
| for that. Or I'm sure Microsoft would be willing to pay a
| lot if Google is not.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Google paying all of its employees to work on Chrome, or
| it pays Chrome to be the default search engine to a new
| company called Chrome so Chrome can pay its employees.
| What's the difference?
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue
| sources.
|
| The question reveals the problem.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That would be their problem, not whoever orders it to be
| broken up. And frankly, that should have happened _years_
| ago.
| behringer wrote:
| Sorry but Jerry is definitely the bad guy. The bad guy
| often does evil shit just for the money. In this case Jerry
| is trying to hold back human progress. Screw Jerry and
| everything he stands for and screw his management and the
| investors for putting him in this position with bullshit
| incentive structures
| Brybry wrote:
| It's still bizarre to me that Google was ever allowed to
| purchase DoubleClick (even though DoubleClick was far more
| evil).
| to11mtm wrote:
| They managed to do it at the right time; back then most
| people still thought they actually followed "Don't be
| Evil". Also, unless I am misremembering, the acquisition
| was completed before the first commercial Android phone
| was even announced, they were a much smaller company.
| hfjjbf wrote:
| [dead]
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The strategy to appease by finding additional revenue sources
| seems flawed. Regardless of these additional revenue sources,
| you're still leaving money on the table by not rolling back.
| Ideally you roll back and add the additional revenue sources.
|
| To be clear, they shouldn't roll back. Because it's shitty.
| But that's the reason - "It's shitty" - not "we can add
| additional revenue sources elsewhere too." If you validate
| ads team's concern for revenue but then dont maximize revenue
| then you should expect them to be dissatisfied.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Detecting sarcasm online these days is nearly impossible.
| hackernewds wrote:
| nice rescue hah
| lozenge wrote:
| Anil did address that in the earliest message (page 5)
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Did they roll back the change? We can argue about pressure
| all we want. enshittification is a thing, regardless of
| monopoly.
| nojito wrote:
| They made google search the default instead of your
| previous webpage visits.
| mistercheph wrote:
| I'm assuming this related to the omnibox auto-searching
| alternative providers with default keywords or broadcasting
| that a user can hit tab to search (e.g. typing wikipedia or
| youtube in omnibox)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| What a soul destroying job. One way to make the revenue up is
| just show Google results when someone types in another URL
| like https://news.ycombinator.com/. Why not? Makes more SQVs.
| Oops we thought you wanted to search for that URL!
| generationP wrote:
| Could it have been what led to this? https://support.google.c
| om/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-o...
| elteto wrote:
| "I don't want the message to be we are doing this because the
| ads team needs more revenue" ...but then that is exactly why
| they are doing it. Sales team needs to reach their bonus quota!
| They can't be demoralized!
|
| This is a rare glimpse at the enshitification process
| _actually_ happening.
|
| I can almost read the above in David Attenborough's voice.
| Feels like a documentary.
| BlackNitrogen wrote:
| That's just such an example of how it works. "Our employees
| are in high cost of living areas, missing earnings will be
| demoralizing". If you worked in a large corp for a while, you
| notice this happening. Everyone is incentivized to hit short
| term goals.
| einpoklum wrote:
| These days, I work for (some part of) a large corporation.
| In my anecdotal experience, the people who get upset about
| missing earnings are managers, not regular employees nor
| even tech leads. And even that is at the annual level or
| longer-term; quarterly results are considered quite
| ephemeral.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Regular employees definitely notice when they don't get
| raises or bonuses. Whether they draw the line to
| quarterly results...
| 60secs wrote:
| I want to hear Attenborough annotate Jerry's morning today.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > This is a rare glimpse at the enshitification process
| _actually_ happening.
|
| Love this. For some reason I thought of those science
| experiments along the lines of "Our super powerful
| microscopes and cameras can now record chemical reactions in
| real time!" This is a case of "Yes, right there! 'If we don't
| make this shitty change we all miss our bonus' is _exactly_
| how enshittification happens! ".
| bitwize wrote:
| "Here we observe the marketroid in its natural habitat. Note
| the ruthless, predatory behavior..."
| klabb3 wrote:
| "...counting their beans, realizing it's not enough to last
| through the winter of Q1"
| rdtsc wrote:
| > "I don't want the message to be we are doing this because
| the ads team needs more revenue"
|
| That's pure gold. When people start with "I don't want to / I
| am not ..." and then proceed to say or do exactly that.
|
| - "I don't want to be the asshole here" /proceeds to be an
| asshole. - "To be perfectly honest" /starts making stuff up
|
| Jerry is really pushing there and the goal is clear: "Long-
| term: It feels like through some deliberate efforts we can
| actually use entry points like Chrome to drive query
| growth... we should explore this aggressively."
|
| None of this is surprising but it's interesting to have it
| right from the horses' mouths, so to speak.
| solardev wrote:
| Translation: You need to do this so we get paid. Same team,
| right? But don't make us look bad. Spin it so we don't get
| the blame.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Well, to be "fair", he never said he wanted to _not do_
| it...
|
| They just don't want that to be the _message_ that
| accompanies it.
| cj wrote:
| This is a great example of corporate politics.
|
| Author clearly states in the email that the he's not saying
| X. But every single word around "I'm not saying X" is clearly
| saying X.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| It's hard to read that without thinking about weaving a giant
| wicker man over the deary winter days.
| technick wrote:
| That's all I needed to see before making up my mind, Google
| needs to be broken up, or alphabet or whatever they're calling
| themselves these days. Advertising needs to become a separate
| company, not managed by anyone with controlling stakes in
| google and visa versa.
| hyeonwho22 wrote:
| I think advertising needs to be broken into several
| _competing_ companies. Otherwise it is just spinning off the
| most profitable part of the company as its own standalone
| monopoly, and leaving the services users find useful as
| businesses without revenue streams.
| m463 wrote:
| I think advertising needs to be separated from data
| collection and other assaults on privacy.
| noddingham wrote:
| Must be great to get a PhD in CS and get hired by the Search
| team these days. I hope the high pay is worth it.
| eviks wrote:
| The don't have searchable/indexed docs, right, only images?
| oneepic wrote:
| One offtopic comment from me, sorry-- I took one look at the
| page, it said "pdf" with an open button, and I hit the back
| button... Am I the only paranoid one??
| [deleted]
| hadrien01 wrote:
| That's because your browser doesn't have a PDF reader.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's funny I was just talking about this yesterday. By tying
| compensation so tightly to stock price, it incentivizes
| everyone to do what's best for the stock price, not what's best
| for the customer.
|
| This email is the perfect example of that.
| manquer wrote:
| Hardly , users are not the customers we are not paying for
| search , they only have to maintain the image so we don't
| sour on the brand , they don't have to care about our actual
| experience there are no competitors
|
| The customers are ad buyers and their concerns and revenue
| dips are being taken seriously here as the public company
| /esop system is designed to do.
| gen220 wrote:
| Aligning employees' interests with the long-term interests of
| the company is really challenging.
|
| A typical counterexample to compensating in proportion to
| equity performance is compensating in proportion to revenue
| or profit performance (i.e. something still related to market
| performance, but with fewer tangential variabilities).
|
| But I don't think that switcheroo would have resulted in a
| different outcome, here?
|
| I think, perhaps, the underlying issue is the cultural norm
| of lionizing revenue to the exclusion of all other corporate
| principles. In this case, it's not really the Sales person's
| fault. It's Jerry's manager, or Jerry's managers' manager,
| etc. - for allowing the feature-blind prioritization of
| revenue to fester.
| jedberg wrote:
| Most businesses have one or more metrics that they track
| that mirrors customer happiness or satisfaction. For
| example Netflix has total paid subscribers. Amazon has
| monthly active users (as does reddit and whole bunch of
| other companies). Reddit also has daily average time on
| site.
|
| You could easily tie compensation to these metrics. Of
| course in some cases these too can be gamed, but as long as
| you find a metric that mirrors customer happiness, then
| everyone is incentivized to increase customer happiness.
| prox wrote:
| It also incentives short-term thinking and results. Some
| managers will burn whole departments just to hit a target and
| then leave after they got their bonus and the company goes
| down.
| tempodox wrote:
| Maybe companies that let themselves be controlled by such
| forces deserve to go down.
| arebop wrote:
| The problem is that ~all companies let themselves be
| controlled by such forces. Given there are so few counter
| examples it looks like it is a systemic issue and not a
| choice each board makes independently.
|
| Google's unusual share class structure was supposed to
| give them a degree of independence from these forces, but
| it didn't last. They still tie employee comp to share
| prices, so they still have to care about share prices.
| Facebook has even stronger centralization of shareholder
| power, but its pay structure is very similar. Can you
| think of any example of a public company that is
| resisting these forces?
| dahfizz wrote:
| Apple comes to mind as a company with some degree of long
| term vision and strong leadership. They are meticulous
| about maintaining their brand, and so far have resisted
| the enshitification.
|
| They also have more cash than they know how to spend. So
| maybe the pressure to increase revenue _this quarter_ is
| just lower in general.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They also destroy perfectly good computers with their
| trade-in system, reducing the resale and spare parts
| market. This would be the plot of one of those
| environmentalist children's cartoons.
| delfinom wrote:
| That's the majority of US run companies these days. If it
| isn't employees with stock grants, the executives themselves
| have performance bonuses. So doing every long term business
| killing thing for short term personal profit is status quo.
| comprambler wrote:
| why companies are terrible
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
|
| depressing
| fallingknife wrote:
| So you think that companies would be better if the
| shareholders were not a check on CEO power? Basically that
| would make all companies like tech companies with dual
| class shares that give the CEO perpetual absolute power.
| mistercheph wrote:
| The problem with shareholders as the ruling class of an
| organization is that they are prima facie incapable of
| having a vision, projecting it, and marshalling the
| resources to make it a reality. Because they act as a
| crowd, they can only converge on their common interest,
| which is profit. When the shareholders have their way, a
| profitable venture and it's customers are min-maxed for
| share values until the enterprise is left a pile of
| rubble
| Terr_ wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if future civilizations will look back
| on this as a kind of socio-technological inadequacy:
| "See, this is what people had to deal with before we
| invented Zlormian Goal Contracts!"
|
| This kinda-relates to other legal theories, such the rule
| against perpetuities [0], since it's hard to assemble a
| framework that can survive 50.0001% of the shareholders
| deciding to loot it.
|
| The closest I can think of actually involves legal-
| statute and tax law, where a company incorporates for an
| explicitly-charitable or non-profit purpose and then the
| government enforces that status indefinitely.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| This is unbelievable. Imagine how different the world would
| be today if this had gone the other way.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If it had gone the other way it would have been
| overturned probably pretty quickly. It doesn't make sense
| for owners of something to not be in control of it.
| kmlx wrote:
| i don't find it at all unbelievable. i think the
| judgement is pretty spot on:
|
| > A business corporation is organized and carried on
| primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers
| of the directors are to be employed for that end. The
| discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice
| of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a
| change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or
| to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in
| order to devote them to other purposes...
| chongli wrote:
| You never know, it's the law of unintended consequences.
| Maybe it would've caused people to walk away from stocks
| as an investment. Maybe people would've put all their
| money in real estate instead. Kind of staggering if you
| think about how much worse the whole housing crisis could
| be.
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| In this instance their customers are the advertisers / ad
| buyers not chrome users.
| ycombinatornews wrote:
| "...and this is why I did not push harder..." This is a full-on
| circus. Bonuses and stock drop and revenue plus solving a
| problem for team Sales using team Chrome is just pathetic.
|
| It could be easy to assume this happens across all Google
| products.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| Absolutely. The entirety of Google's consumer footprint was
| leveraged to try to make Google Plus a success. And that was
| just the first example I saw when I joined.
| birken wrote:
| And how did that go?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Would you mind posting the source which has the list of all the
| documents?
| [deleted]
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Sorry, this was a doc that came up in Jerry's testimony
| before they pulled everything down. I happened to still have
| the tab open and found it on archive.org
| EMCymatics wrote:
| You're a hero we needed
| aragonite wrote:
| If they are going to redact all the percentage figures by
| covering them with a box they should at least use a monospace
| font or something.
| choppaface wrote:
| If a Google exec is dumb enough to put this diatribe in an
| email instead of a call, just think what they do with your data
| / browsing history.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > "But given this has been live for 7 months and is very
| usable[sic] visible (see this reddit[link] thread where users
| in our ablation experiment noticed and called it a bug!)"
|
| The reddit link & comment is just... _chef 's kiss_
| Fluorescence wrote:
| > ablation experiment
|
| What is that? "Ablation" as in removal? Do they AB test
| removing new features just for data? ... and also monitor SM
| threads for feedback?
| Atsuii wrote:
| Yes ablation as in removal. They then refer to using the 3%
| experiment to estimate out revenue loss, so it appears they
| were running an AB test where it was removed for 3% of
| users so they could understand the metric impact of
| removal. Part of being a decent PM is monitoring SM for any
| feature talk.
| hyeonwho22 wrote:
| In AI research ablation experiments are comparative tests,
| but in one branch some feature is removed. Here the Chrome
| team is saying that removal of the feature (which the Ads
| team wanted) was instantly noticed by users.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This gets to what I was saying earlier in the week regarding
| visibility in this trial: What is made visible as a three-way
| conversation between the judge, the defendant, and the plaintiff,
| and the balance of fairness to both plaintiff and defendant
| versus public interest in visibility is decided on a case-by-case
| basis.
|
| Here, it looks like the DOJ pushed and some information was
| disclosed. That's working as intended.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Hopefully you can "Brave", "Kagi", and/or "DuckDuckGo" them
| minerva23 wrote:
| Brave is going ad supported, so it'll be under the same
| pressure as Google. I'm trying Kagi and still reserving
| judgement.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Ya same but it can't be "as bad", right? I realize the
| naivete and irony inherent to that speculation but please
| entertain and edify me
| NegativeK wrote:
| There's no reason to believe that a competitor who's doing
| worse would do the right thing more...
| [deleted]
| otoburb wrote:
| The publicly available case docket where trial documents will be
| posted: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/united-
| states-...
| vxNsr wrote:
| and I'm sure this will be magically delisted from google search
| for some odd reason...
| almogo wrote:
| It's the fifth result when you search "UNITED STATES OF
| AMERICA v. GOOGLE".
| focusedone wrote:
| First result on DuckDuckGo :-)
| hackernewds wrote:
| There are other relevant results for US vs Google as
| well. They all seem relevant ;-)
| hackernewds wrote:
| why are you sure? it shows up for me :)
| gretch wrote:
| When it stays up, are you going to change your beliefs about
| how Google indexes?
|
| Just google "google courtlistener case" for dozens of
| examples of past cases that are still there.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| We have the best memory holes, fam...
| mlissner wrote:
| I run CourtListener. Usually the problem is the opposite:
| It's too hard to get things OUT of Google.
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(page generated 2023-09-27 23:00 UTC)