
UK judge's ultimatum to Google in Foundem case - samizdis
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/03/google_foundem_high_court_seo_expert/
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samizdis
Actual headline reads: UK judge gives Google a choice: Either let SEO expert
read your ranking algos or withdraw High Court evidence

Tough choice for adtech monolith in Foundem case

Lengthy El Reg headlines are a pain for posting.

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hak8or
Yeah, the court basically wants to have one of the biggest companies on the
planet divulge a large part of their core IP (money maker) to a person who's
interest align to game that IP.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google were to just flat out deny this and tell the
country to pound sand at that point.

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guitarbill
On the other hand, they disclosed those documents in the court proceeding (I'm
assuming they didn't have to, if they can withdraw it now). So it seems the
court is just asking them to follow normal discovery procedure, in allowing
the other side to actually look at the facts. Google's barrister should've
probably expected something like this.

This case is highly interesting though, and should give pause to any company
operating off opaque algorithms it can't explain. Personally, I don't object
to this, just like personal data, it isn't all upsides - if you're profiting
of these things, you need to accept the downsides, too.

To be honest, I'm more surprised Google can't lay out why they were de-ranked
in some other way. While it might give some insight, surely it's better than
revealing the entire algo? (edit: I guess that might open the door to further,
exploratory lawsuits)

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armatav
I’m sure you can’t just “read the algorithms”, they’re not all designed as a
bunch of long human interpretable strings that get concatenated together like
some massive regex.

