This one has more context in noting that the PDF linked earlier was training material:
At trial, Roszak told the court that he didn't recall if he ever gave the presentation. He said that the course required that he tell students "things I don’t believe as part of the presentation." He also claimed that the notes were "full of hyperbole and exaggeration" and did not reflect his true beliefs, "because there was no business purpose associated with it."
It's newsticker updates of a very minor trial detail that is now getting its own front-page newsticker updates on top of the trial newsticker updates. that sort of thing tends to be hn-offtopic just by it's high sample rate, more or less independent of what it's about.
Yeahhh this is pretty weak. Reading the doc [1] there's nothing about getting users "hooked on search". The point is that Google is able to "ignore the demand side" simply because search is so sticky: it turns out that users are not likely to switch search engines if the results are good enough. That means it has similar economics to drugs and cigarettes, but not that search is addictive like the headline heavily implies. Ars is usually better than this.
> When talking about revenue, we could mostly ignore the demand side of the equation (users and queries) and only focus on supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales. Sure, we had to build the best product, made smart marketing/distribution investments to get our product everywhere, but we could essentially tear the economics textbook in half.
They explicitly mention "we had to build the best product", so I'm not sure where you're getting the "not any product attributes" bit from. (Your linked article is paywalled.)
> They explicitly mention "we had to build the best product"
But to them, "the best product" is the one that maximizes their profits from ads, not the one that does the best job of giving users what they want. Obviously there is overlap between these, but they're not the same thing.
At tech companies I've worked at, when people use phrases like "the best product" or "product quality", they are in fact using those phrases to mean "the product that does the best job of giving users what they want".
> when people use phrases like "the best product" or "product quality", they are in fact using those phrases to mean "the product that does the best job of giving users what they want".
Perhaps, but Google's actual behavior makes it clear that, whether they want to admit it or not, Google's executives are not using the terms that way.
To me this shows how disconnected from reality Google's executives are. They think advertising is just the "supply" side and that they can ignore the "demand" side entirely. In fact, since advertisers are Google's customers, Google is the supply side--they supply the advertising opportunities--and the advertisers are the demand side--they pay for the advertising opportunities that are available. Users are neither supply nor demand to Google, economically speaking: they are a capital resource that Google uses to produce what they supply to their customers.
In other words, the complacent position Google's executives feel themselves to be in is not because they are somehow avoiding supply and demand economics: it is because, due to their first-mover position in search, they have a huge capital resource--all the users who use Google search because it was the first good enough search engine available and force of habit is very strong--which their search competitors do not have. But that resource is not unassailable. Google's search experience has been deteriorating because of ads. But Google's executives don't even see that. They think their search team is doing an awesome job.
I don't think it's accurate to say that users are only a capital resource. The users are still customers for Google, even if they are not explicitly paying out of their own wallets for the service -- they are free to walk away at any time. Google has to keep both the users and the advertisers 'happy enough' if they want to succeed. The article highlights that the bar to keep the users 'happy enough' is fairly low.
> The users are still customers for Google, even if they are not explicitly paying out of their own wallets for the service -- they are free to walk away at any time.
No, that still doesn't make them customers. It makes them a capital resource that Google does not have complete control over. Which is something I'm not sure Google's executives fully grasp.
It is true that there can be customer relationships, in the economic sense, even if the value exchanged is not money on either side of the relationship. But in a customer relationship, the value exchange choice is voluntary on both sides. That is not true in the case of Google and its users; Google's value exchange choices are voluntary (it decides how its search service works and what ads to show the user, and what data to harvest from user interactions), but many user choices are not (users can choose whether or not to use Google search and what terms to search for, but they cannot choose what ads they get shown or what data Google harvests from their search activity).
> users are not likely to switch search engines if the results are good enough
I’ve been using DDG for a few years. I don’t even remember why I started using it. So far the results from DDG have been “good enough” that I’ve never felt the need to switch to Google, even for a single search. If DDG was the default search engine in people’s browsers, I wonder how many would just use it instead of changing to google.
Perhaps. I don't think this reflects anything unethical on the part of Google, but it does represent that market dynamics aren't working.
The point of antitrust isn't so much to punish bad people as to make for efficient markets.
Under mainstream economic theory, Google ought to be regulated. That's good for everyone, Google employees and most Google investors included (by numbers and not dollars; most Google investors hold diverse portfolios).
If the industry and economy as a whole grow, at the expense of Google, both my overall investments and my job options improve.
Corporations aren't human beings with moral rights, and laws are there to keep them beneficial and efficient, but to preserve some abstract corporate freedom.
> The point of antitrust isn't so much to punish bad people as to make for efficient markets.
That's the story those who favor antitrust want you to believe, but it's not true. Antitrust actions historically have made markets less efficient, not more. A classic case is the breakup of Alcoa aluminum, whose "offense" was to supply aluminum to its customers at lower prices and larger quantities than any of its competitors. The breakup both raised prices and reduced quantities, making things worse for customers.
> Under mainstream economic theory, Google ought to be regulated.
Even leaving aside the concerns above, Google is not a monopoly in the sense of antitrust law. The real economic problem with Google is that its users are not its customers; users are just a resource to be exploited to maximize profits due to ads. If the government were to do anything to "fix" this, the obvious thing would be to outlaw that business model.
A classic case is the breakup of Alcoa aluminum, whose "offense" was to supply aluminum to its customers at lower prices and larger quantities than any of its competitors. The breakup both raised prices and reduced quantities, making things worse for customers.
Much the same story with Standard Oil. What young people learn in school from left-leaning economics professors often diverges quite radically from what actually happened.
No it’s not good for everyone when the government has more power. It’s usually bad and the government regulators always seem to want to regulate content that the party in power disagrees with.
The government rarely understands technology and pays no thought to unintended consequences
You think they should not be able to regulate monopolies? The free market only works with regulation or else we end up back in the 1800s Trust era where a few people owned all the industries and you couldn't get your shipments transported on rail lines owned by someone with a competing business interest.
Most people I know use Google but did not choose Google. They just bought a smartphone. There are limited options, buy a more expensive fancy apple, or a less expensive, a bit less fancy android. That is the only choice given/taken.
I know, people on HN will counter argument that there are tons of other options, but most people I know that use Google, are not aware.
In fact that is where this lawsuit at its core is about.
So in the US, 60% of people buy iPhones and 95%+ buy non ChromeOS computers, yet Chrome is still the dominant browser. How is that of people didn’t make a choice.
And it’s not like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook who all tried to enter the smart phone market and failed were some poor underfunded startups.
Google is still reaping its fruits from the early 2000's investments in a new browser that was lightweight and stable but had powerful search and apps, unlike the default browser of MS. So at that point in time people deliberately installed chrome on their PC since the default did not fulfill their wishes.
That doesn't mean that people today are choosing chrome and google search, as they come by default on their smartphones. Most smartphone users don't even know that the browser and search engine can be changed rather easily.
Chrome was never “lightweight” and it was a fork of WebKit that has actually focused less and less on being “lightweight” since it created its own fork.
In the US, only 40% of buyers are buying Android phones. On desktops, Chrome also has a majority market share and 97% of desktops don’t come with Chrome as the default.
Why don't you guys let the lawyers do the arguing for you. The great grandparent I was responding to was arguing against the ability of the state to even bring the lawsuit.
> The difference is that people choose Google. You can go to any website you want to.
This lawsuit is set to determine whether that is case. You can argue for or against that, but arguing against the ability of the people to have a lawsuit to determine that is nonsensical.
> You think they should not be able to regulate monopolies?
Exactly. When the government has done this, it has made things worse, not better. See my reference to Alcoa Aluminum upthread, for example.
> The free market only works with regulation
A free market even with no government regulation still is regulated: it's regulated by the voluntary choices of all the market participants. In a free market, nobody can be forced to trade with anybody else; so if you want to make money, you have to offer something other people want and will voluntarily pay you for.
The natural order of the free market is towards monopolies or cartels. Why compete when you can merge or buy the startup before they get big enough to bother you?
If you are the only one offering what they need then they have no choice, do they?
> The natural order of the free market is towards monopolies or cartels.
I don't know where you're getting that from. Monopolies are almost always created by governments; indeed, the original meaning of the word "monopoly" was an exclusive privilege granted by the king to sell a particular product. Cartels in free markets don't last because there is a strong incentive for cartel members to defect, since they can increase their profits by doing so; it takes governmental agreements (such as the Middle Eastern oil cartel upheld by the governments of the countries involved) to prevent such defection.
> Why compete when you can merge or buy the startup before they get big enough to bother you?
If the startup is a real competitor, in a free market its owners will be able to realize more upside by competing with you than by being bought by you.
> If you are the only one offering what they need then they have no choice, do they?
In a free market this won't happen: if there is enough demand, it is always in someone's interest to start a competing producer.
> Have you figured out the answer to that?
Historically, the reason the obvious free market things I describe don't always happen is that governments mess with markets, making them not free. So the obvious answer is to not do that.
Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on PC operating systems. They did get gifted a huge market share by IBM making not one, but two bonehead moves, first giving MS the license to DOS and then dawdling on OS/2 long enough for Bill Gates to lose patience and ship Windows 3. But MS never had a monopoly. Apple shipped PCs with their own OS. IBM had their own version of DOS and shipped PCs with it. There were even still CP/M machines around for a while. And there was Atari and Commodore, each of which shipped their own PCs with their own OSes. Then Unix variants began to be available for PCs.
Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly either. There were other oil companies in the business. But Standard Oil was selling oil, at a profit, at lower prices and in greater quantities than any of its competitors. The competitors didn't like that and got the government to break up Standard Oil under antitrust law. Which, as I've said, made things worse for customers.
In other words, if the competition simply doesn't compete very well, or makes bonehead decisions, a company can get a large market share, yes. But "large market share" is not the same as "monopoly".
If you want a better example of government created monopoly, look at ISPs in many areas of the US, where for many years state and local governments gave one company exclusive rights to sell Internet access in particular areas. With the expected result that Internet access sucked as compared to areas where there was competition. Much of that has gone away now, and Internet access as a result is much improved in those areas.
And the antitrust lawsuit had absolutely no effect on MS’s desktop market share. It was the free market that allowed Apple and Google to usurp Microsoft’s influence via mobile and the web.
Your comment has little to do with the nonsense being spouted about monopolies almost always being due to government.
"Free market" isn't a particularly well defined concept given the broad range of its interpretation and use, eg: Churchill's "Land is the mother of all monopoly" comment wrt land ownership dragging down a truly 'free' market., etc.
> Historically, the reason the obvious free market things I describe don't always happen is that governments mess with markets, making them not free. So the obvious answer is to not do that.
We tried that in the 1800s. Have you read any history?
It must be nice having such a great escape hatch you can use whenever your ideology is questioned ("government did it") and when confronted you can just use it again. Unfortunately the world isn't so simple. I am not sure how you reconcile reality with your dogma, as you can literally see monopolies forming in real time, but I guess throwing the government boogie man in works well enough for you that no attempt at reason will break through it.
How do you address the substance of a fantasy? You are ideologically opposed to government and have a quasi religious faith in the free market fixing all problems without intervention. If the market cannot be intervened with then it is doing its work as a 'force' and might as well be The Holy Spirit. You state demonstrably false things or split definitions down to a hair (yes -- the only REAL monopolies have been government mandated, because by definition the only way to force all competitors from competing is to make it illegal) but I don't think people care about technically correct when they are working in company towns for scrip and their kids fall into coal crushers while working because their are no laws protecting people, just business.
Fun fact: the first tactical bombing from an airplane was on striking mine workers in the USA.
I'm curious how we can read the same thing and come to such different conclusions. Can you elaborate on your view?
When I read this, I see a company effectively gloating about establishing such a firm monopoly, in part through "marketing/distribution investments", that they could effectively ignore their customers, and focus instead on entirely exploiting them. The document voluntarily choosing to parallel their level of control over their users as something normally only obtained by illicit industries, like drug dealers is, to me, just one of those 'wow I can't believe you were stupid enough to put this into text' type things.
In your mind, what would be reasonably viable smoking gun for a monopoly pursuing corporation to write down? The Sherman Antitrust Act is described by Wiki [1] as prohibiting "1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market." It goes on to mention that "[a] monopoly achieved solely by merit, is legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not."
> they could effectively ignore their customers, and focus instead on entirely exploiting them
Google's users are not customers. Google is exploiting their users precisely because they are not customers, so their only value to Google is as a resource for maximizing their profits due to ads. Which actually makes them worse than, say, cigarette manufacturers, since at least their users were their customers, choosing to purchase a product.
Whether Google users are customers or not, is just wording. They are part of the eco system, just like the OS, the servers, the HW or SW devs, the agencies paying for advertising and so on.
Google needs to keep all members of that eco system content and treat them respectfully, labeled customer or not.
> Whether Google users are customers or not, is just wording.
No, it isn't, it's a huge difference. If Google's users were paying customers, Google's incentives for how to treat its users would be very different.
> They are part of the eco system
"Customer" does not mean "part of the eco system". It means something much more specific.
> Google needs to keep all members of that eco system content and treat them respectfully, labeled customer or not.
If you think Google is actually doing this, you're delusional. And to the extent Google's leadership thinks they are doing this, they are delusional as well.
I do understand your reasoning and points. But I think the reality is less black and white. Google's users might not be directly paying customers literally, but they are paying indirectly by buying goods and services. Part of that amount goes to Google via the payout of advertising services.
Also, Google operates an eco system that offers value. A lot of users might have a sort of search or buy addiction, but they are not all addicts that can be / are treated as disposable resources.
> they are paying indirectly by buying goods and services. Part of that amount goes to Google via the payout of advertising services.
By this logic everyone is a customer of everyone else, since we all buy goods and services part of the payment for which ends up going to all of us. That makes "customer" a useless term. It's much better to stick to the actual economic definition, which is the one I've been using.
> Google operates an eco system that offers value.
Sure, but that doesn't mean everyone who makes use of some of that value is Google's customer. That's a big part of what makes the ad supported business model so dysfunctional.
> A lot of users might have a sort of search or buy addiction, but they are not all addicts that can be / are treated as disposable resources.
Whether or not a particular user is an addict of Google products, as far as Google is concerned, they are a disposable resource. That's a necessary consequence of the ad-supported business model that Google has chosen. And while Google is not going to drop search as a service, Google has certainly discontinued plenty of other services in the past that were providing lots of value to users--but Google didn't care because those services weren't making enough ad revenues. So Google's actual behavior makes clear that, whether or not Google wants to admit it, its users are disposable resources.
The degree to which a document is embarrassing if shown to the general public is not necessarily related to its legal significance in an antitrust trial. The court may very reasonably conclude that this is weak evidence given the context, but it could still be extremely embarrassing when compressed into meme form.
Conversely, evidence that is far too dry to make a good embarrassing meme could be the conclusive proof the court needs to take action.
If your company execs are basically bragging about ignoring fundamental principles of a healthy capital based market due to total control of said market, in an anti trust hearing, then yeah that's some pretty solid evidence you are breaking the law.
Never heard that story. It is funny. I have to try out this technique some time. Add an obvious flaw or oddity, which is easy to leave out afterwards, to a deliverable, so it covers up other problems or imperfections.
Even without building up a profile on you, the antitrust case is still there. If Google uses illegal means to retain an effective monopoly on search traffic, it still keeps a chokehold on ads and can keep prices artificially high.
Search ads hardly need personalization profile, as the query itself already has a incredibly strong signal for what would be good to sell you, and other query metadata (location, time of day) boosts that a lot.
The reason Google pays to monopolize search is due to how it feeds into their personalized advertising.
This case against Google is addressing the symptom rather then the real problem/incentive. Make invasive personalized advertising "opt in" only and the marketplace will address the search issue.
You don't understand how lucrative search is by itself. Google pays to monopolize search because they make a lot of money from the paid promoted search results (AdWords). Those can be personalized but most of the time they're simply based on your query.
The personalization profile based on searches and other stuff is used for their display network (ads across the web), but that entire network is way less valuable than Google Search alone. [0]
That would solve only a tiny part of the problem. The elephant is the monopoly on search. Ironically, most probably MS is beating them around this time with more powerful search tech and it will be time to anti-trust MS.
> What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it?
For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively.
Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms.
The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference.
Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming.
Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.
I don’t understand what you’re disagreeing with me here. You’ve just shown why the village grocer making this recommendation is different than the credit card company doing this at scale using algorithms.
Also, not sure if you’re aware, but the data that the credit card company gets is really horrible. The category information is often wrong, the business name being billed is often different than the name of the business you’re buying things at, etc. They do have your credit score and probably more accurate financial situation. Google has far better information about you and your behaviors though than the CC company in general.
It’s a flawed analogy. If you are worried about being tracked and surveilled, there are much larger things to worry about than an ad tech company masquerading as a search engine.
You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work.
If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech???
And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that
> You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work.
I am, but actually the government is under many more legal constraints to do so than a private party. That’s why the government does all these end runs to buy data off the commercial data streams. Cut off those private data streams and the ability for government to do this gets significantly reduced.
By no means is it perfect. Never claimed that. But generally you find that mass egregious bad practices by the government either get stopped or legalized (eg Bush’s NSA tapping into telephony systems directly and spying was quite a scandal). So yes, the government does all sorts of shady shit and have forever and they usually try to keep it as quiet as possible for as long as possible. That has nothing to do with private companies misbehaviors which is what we’re talking about here. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Yes. US enforcement of the drug trade is waaaay more lax than it has been in the past. The last time I remember reading about federal enforcement against state legal weed enterprises was toward’s the end of Bush’s term which is now 13 years ago. Social attitudes have also drastically shifted. Several places have already started decriminalizing magic mushrooms and weed is legal in most states and it’s more a question of when it will stop being illegal federally.
> Is anyone trying to curtail police power?
Yes. There was the whole defund the police movement, there’s constantly lawsuits about the police, there’s been actual legitimate prosecutions (albeit rare) against police (which is a step up from it never happening ever even if laughably insufficient given the amount of outrage that needed to be generated). Just because you may not be paying attention doesn’t mean stuff doesn’t change.
> How are they infringing on your rights in a way that you can just not use them?
I’d recommend brushing up on economics textbooks and how monopolies disrupt the market. Specifically, there are the two most common ways:
1. Lower prices when a real competitor pops up that runs more efficiently to drive them out of the market, raise prices back up once they’re gone.
Lots of examples like this, not sure about Google itself. Eg look at what Amazon did to kill diapers.com even though that company was disrupting the market in a profitable way (ie Amazon couldn’t actually compete but instead used their pocketbook and shady business tactics to outmaneuver them and force them into selling themselves to Amazon ).
2. Leverage your majority/monopoly position to retain that position. The government’s position with this case is that having a majority position in the market means they’re able to retain that majority regardless of any external competition.
In all cases, Google is harming me by causing hire prices in the market and inefficiencies in the marketplace. Google is also big enough that this gets magnified by quite a bit and seeps into other areas beyond search.
Also, the “you can just not use them” argument is pretty tired and requires willful blindness. That argument has always been trotted out as monopolies always had “competitors”. That doesn’t alter that large businesses can have lots of negative impact just because of their size.
The police are still very much targeting minorities and the justice system still gives harsher sentences to minorities for the same crime.
Police stop minorities in most major cities and profile. As far as weed enforcement by the federal government, as long as it’s the law, it can still be reintroduced. While Trump himself didn’t care to enforce it, his first AG very much wanted to but was stymied by a bipartisan unwillingness to fund it. But selective enforcement is still dangerous.
Who do you think a Desantis administration or a Pence administration would go after?
Google sells nothing of value at any meaningful scale - but ads.
You want to see a “million ad tech companies bloom”?
Yes you have complete agency not to use Google and they don’t even have a monopoly on advertising
You are questioning the benefits of having a government? I would say, {1} be happy that you have one and {2} be happy that yours is not among the worst. I think a fully free unregulated market would end up horribly for 99 percent of people.
I’m questioning the benefits of not having an unlimited government. Who exactly is Google - an adtech company “harming”? You have the agency to not use Google as does everyone else.
It actually is. With Google being sued, if you start talking to a coworker and then say “let’s talk about this <on a none work recorded communication channel>, you may very well be questioned about what you wanted to talk about.
The government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications.
> if you start talking to a coworker and then say “let’s talk about this <on a none work recorded communication channel>, you may very well be questioned about what you wanted to talk about
Sure? This is how investigations work? There is no automatic assumption of guilt, which is what you said.
I’m sceptical of government overreach. But asking what was discussed in a meeting is incredibly standard investigative fare.
> government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications
This is wrong. It’s forcing them inasmuch as my asking what you had for lunch forces] you to wear a wire.
> Sure? This is how investigations work? There is no automatic assumption of guilt, which is what you said.
I know I would hate to have been questioned about why I wanted to take a conversation out of my corporate channel when I was trying to have an after work “get together” with a cute coworker over a decade ago (that cute coworker is now my wife).
> I’m sceptical of government overreach. But asking what was discussed in a meeting is incredibly standard investigative fare.
It’s not just what was discussed, the government is assuming any time that you ask a coworker to “call you” that they are going to question you.
I know I would never talk to anyone in the government without my own lawyer - and that would cost money.
> I would hate to have been questioned about why I wanted to take a conversation out of my corporate channel
Okay? That doesn’t make the line of questioning illegitimate. I, too, dislike being questioned about anything by anyone.
> the government is assuming any time that you ask a coworker to “call you” that they are going to question you
Yes. They will also pull your call records and ask you what was discussed. Again, this is super normal. What, would you like to block investigators from asking what was discussed at meetings?
> I would never talk to anyone in the government without my own lawyer
You’re complaining about the government’s general right to investigate? You know that before these records you would still be questioned, right?
Your libertarian take disregards that Google is only answerable to its shareholders and uses money as a primary motivator while the government is answerable to the people it governs and has public good as its primary motivator.
It’s not libertarianism. It’s a strong distrust of government power because I see what it does to minorities and how the “other” party will abuse it to suppress speech.
We see it on the state level where companies are afraid to speak out against Desantis because of retaliation.
I define the “other” party as “whichever one you disagree with”. I’m not trying to get into a right vs left argument.
The difference is that the government is not accountable to the majority either between gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc.
For instance, no matter how you feel about abortion, every time a referendum comes up for a vote by the public to restrict it - it’s always defeated even in conservative states yet the legislators go out of their way to work around the people’s will.
The same is true about legalized weed in conservative states or expanding Medicaid.
I can much easier not fall under the influence of Google than the government.
The government is the only force that has a “monopoly on violence”.
A powerful government can do much more harm than an adTech company.
As far as the government having the “public good as a motivator”, are we talking about the same government? The one that goes out of its way not to be answerable to people? The one that funds the “War on Drugs”, “civil forfeiture”, “eminent domain” to take property to give it to another business, etc?
Well it can be “mandated” all it wants to, it has history of not happening. It wasn’t a “mistake” that the Florida governor (I live in Orlando) went out of its way to punish a corporation because it disagreed with a law.
Nor is it a “mistake” that the government seizes people’s property through civil forfeiture without a trial or that the government is actively fighting the will of the majority of the population.
Again, Google doesn’t have the power to do anything but serve ads. The government has the court system, a police department with military weapons, etc.
Some entity has to have those powers. Just because you don't like those in power in your state doesn't mean that regulating businesses is bad. You are taking an extreme position on something unrelated to your grievance.
No government has to have the power to punish corporations for speaking out against a policy or to regulate a company because they think they aren’t getting the coverage they deserve.
This is a common failure mode tech people get into in debates: finding an extreme example as an analogy. There's lots of obvious differences of context and differences of degree which get swept over by a very abstract kind of stripped-bare framework, "what's the essential philosophical difference here?" If someone can't see those differences it's almost pointless trying to enumerate them because honestly it feels like a disingenuous debate trick (my apologies if I'm wrong in that accusation).
You have an extremely wealthy corporation incentivized to collect massive amounts of very personal data about every part of you and you desires and psychology, incentivized and well-able to collect it in hidden and powerful ways across the web and build deep learning models of your psychology and desires, and store them in a place where it's possible for nefarious actors and governments to either legally or illegally access and use that information for unknown purposes. If you object to this characterization, fine, start with the objection, but it's an obvious characterization which I've presented, and it's obvious that this is what people are concerned about! Starting the conversation with "it's no different, philosophically, from your grocer knowing your love of chocolate" is such a non-starter only because it seems so disingenuous, like, how could you not see how your interlocutor sees it differently? It just presents so clean and abstract a little simplification, though, so it's handy for winning point in a debate setting.
> This is a common failure mode tech people get into in debates: finding an extreme example as an analogy.
I don't agree with GP but I want to defend the analogy, which I found perfectly fair. Analogies help us understand the world and uncover internal contradictions in our thinking.
I thought vlovich123's sibling comment did a great job responding the analogy on its merits (making some of the same points you did).
"The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention."
* There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.*
Paying for search won't change the fact that 75% of all web traffic contains Google trackers. This is a fundamental violation of privacy that no one should have to "opt out" of.
Basically, you value Google's business model over human dignity.
They're saying these were notes for a speech for a "communcations class" where he was cosplaying Gorden Gecko and not presenting his true beliefs? That so hard to believe. These notes could not more obviously be an internal memo, filled with clear reasoning about balancing the needs and visions of different internal departments, meant to persuade and stimulate conversation about Google's strategy. I don't see how this "it was for a speech and I was being hyperbolic on purpose" thing isn't getting laughed out of the water.
Money buys lawyers who can argue about anything. With seemingly unlimited legal funds, the company can work to thwart everything just to slow down the trial.
Wow. Is Ars really stretching this hard? Can we not just let the evidence speak for itself?
Despite their desperate attempt to scarequote and chop up excerpts from a direct quote, they fail to demonstrate "Google exec said users get hooked on search engine like “cigarettes or drugs.”"
He didn't say that from what I'm seeing; the quotes they use don't say that, and anyone who can read can clearly see the evidence they provide doesn't support the claim. The unquoted part ("with /economics/ that[...]") even indicate it's not a behavioral observation.
That subheadline really detracts from the point of the article.
Seeing this, I hope they dig more into the motivation and decision making behind massive ranking updates. Essentially, is it only about improving search quality.
what's interesting is that the results of google search are getting more and more crappy like illicit drugs on the market.
But somehow I don't disagree with the comment, it's extremely addictive to believe you could get the answer to any question instantly, even if in reality you'll often get a lot of garbage if your question happens to be in an area where a lot of people have something to sell.
