Technology firms as a threat to basic liberties
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. What has changed is the amount of attention you can get by attacking it.
When Google was little, it seemed cute and inconsequential. To attack it would have seemed mean (and inconsequential). Now that Google is big, attacking it reads instead as "speaking truth to power." But Google is no more evil now than it was in the past. Which is not to say that Google was ever perfect, just that the change in reporters' attitudes toward it derives – whether the reporters realize it or not – from nothing more than its increased size.
I think the current backlash comes mostly from the fact that Google got a lot of good PR out of slogans like "don't be evil" until it turned out that they are just another greedy big corporation.
When was this? I admit I only started reading English media around 2002, but I always remember it being used as a rhetorical device against them.
The original motto was meant as a snarky summary of a typical long list of positive corporate values. "Look, you can remember all these things, or just remember to pick the not-evil choice." More: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html
The direction we're moving towards seems to be one in which Amazon controls what you can buy by blocking out competing products. Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Facebook controls which news you read by allowing for purchased content. It may be related to the size of the company, but I think it's more related to the general conscientiousness of society as a whole and the awareness of how dangerous these companies are.
Is there an example of this?
Nor does it have any effect on the argument here. Google did it in the recent past in China, they do the same thing in the US for politically undesirable content today, and Baidu continues doing it in China. The fact is that we live in an information age, and access to information is gated by the major players. This in turn literally determines what people can learn and what ideas are seen as socially acceptable or not. This amount of propaganda and censorship power is unprecedented.
Google is currently censoring gun purchase related searches in the US, and there's no law requiring them to do it. That should make it quite clear that they have both the capacity and the desire to manipulate public opinion through censorship.
There are people in support of companies fighting and breaking current law if they feel that a certain law does not serve the people. We have censorship in this case. Google is massive company with a ubiquitous name synonymous for web search. What if Google complies with local law without pushback, because they understand that a lot of people would be lost without their service. Hear me out:
Most every user here and probably most people 40 or younger from developed nations understands that Google is a company name. However, I claim (no citation) that a non-trivial portion of the world population thinks that the only place to do a web search is Google's website/search bar. I further claim that a non-trivial amount of people do not know that they could navigate a browser to Wikipedia by going to wikipedia.org rather than by typing wikipedia in the bar, loading search results, and clicking the direct link. Ergo Google being shut down in country would mean that a non-trivial portion of that country's population would think that there is no way to search the web for information. It would also mean that a segment of that userbase would also think that the entirety of the Internet is broken.
Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where "following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at what point does following the law itself become immoral?
There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics / morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)
I guess you mean searching for "Tiananmen square" in China It seems to me it's the Chinese government censoring this, not Google. Google has a role, of course, but it's that it isn't able to stand up to the Chinese Government. (Breaking it up, whatever that means, surely wouldn't improve its leverage over the Chinese government.
Just pointing out, your angst on this score is misdirected. Change in China will not and cannot come from foreign companies operating there.
It can and it must. These companies can and should lobby their governments to place tariffs and restrictions on Chinese companies and their products/services, unless the Chinese become a more open society. An uncensored Google in China would encourage democratic reforms. Democratic reforms would bring Chinese labor rights closer to a Western standard, eroding a principal reason Western firms outsource to China. This rising tide would lift all boats except for the Communist Party's.
History is filled with examples of countries which became more free and then grew through openness and trade. These countries became new markets for companies like Google and many others. What we lack today is leaders with the vision and courage to follow this path, both in politics and business.
1. Recently reported white-out on "gun purchase" related searches. Gun laws (and enforcement) certainly need to be improved, but Google is not the elected body to decide what is good and bad for the society.
2. Banning (or preventing from making money) conservative channels/pundits on YouTube. It does not matter if some of them are lunatics, they are no better or worse than someone pushing "herbal remedies" or some such.
2. What happens when the channels in question violate the ToS (Sandy Hook conspiracies often fall into this category)? Should no action be taken because they have a political slant?
You can certainly make an argument that internet platforms should be less like Facebook and YouTube and more like 4chan's /b board, but you need to at least acknowledge that there are tradeoffs with having a ToS that tolerates everything legal.
https://www.jta.org/2013/06/20/news-opinion/the-telegraph/na...
In an interview I saw with the lawyer, I remember him struggling with the morality of it, but his explanation was pretty amazing. He said something along the lines of: If you allow the encroachment of liberty in the name of silencing Nazis, one day soon, the Nazis will be using that same power against you.
The lawyer's own family didn't understand his dedication to free speech. I personally found his reasoning to make sense. If you allow Google to sensor gun search results, one day, after a change in who's in power there, they may be censoring something that can harm society as a whole.
Consider that Shopping does not carry something else controversial - pornography. Yet, you don't see conservatives get up in arms, demanding that Google start listing it on shopping. Odd, that.
Google is not interested in making money from selling pornography. That's a decision it has made. They could also make a decision to only make money from selling Kosher food, and you'd have no leg to stand on when criticising that.
A marketplace is not a town square. If a marketplace does not want to sell your product, it doesn't matter if the disagreement is political or economic. It's not censorship.
Just because someone can sell guns in America does not mean you are compelled to help them.
Just because you can participate in Nazi speech in America does not mean that it's a big controversy that Norderstrom or Goodwill refuses to carry Hitler Youth hoodies. Freedom of speech requires freedom from compelled speech.
1. search results
2. sponsored ads/links and Google shopping marketplace, which appear separately.
If Google chooses to not accept money from selling X, there will not be X items appearing in the sponsored links (2) section.
But the search itself (1) has always been intended to return the most relevant information, based on the key words.
Without any moral/political judgement, as long as it is legal.
1. Searching for guns and gun accessories in Google Search has, and continues to return relevant gun-related search results.
2. Searching for guns and gun accessories in Google Shopping[1] has had its search results reduced, hence the controversy.
[1] Notice how all of the screencaps[2] posted on Zero Hedge/etc, are of people having the Shopping search tab open.
[2] https://twitter.com/xavierdreyman/status/968272365741330433
There is a notion that Googles usefulness has made it a utility. If that utility chooses to censor, it’s worth discussing. The article I linked about Nazis are to explain the idea that censoring bad things can sometimes backfire. When you stop the bad people from assembling, how do you prevent the definition of bad to be changed in the future?
As a matter of fact, my original comment was about the direction we are going in. With departments dedicated towards weeding out fake news, Google is ignoring its own bias. YouTube is targeting conservative ideas. The Sandy Hook conspiracy theories are perhaps an example of good censorship. At which point in the future will Google censor the next genocide?
This is a fantastic argument against Silicon Valley - that the institutions that it created have too much power.
However, that is not the argument being made in this subthread. Having this argument requires consideration of the institutions that it replaced, and whether or not the concentration of so much market influence in a corporation is a good thing. That's the problem at hand, not the particular politics of such a corporation.
> YouTube is targeting conservative ideas. The Sandy Hook conspiracy theories are perhaps an example of good censorship. At which point in the future will Google censor the next genocide?
I am of the understanding that the problem Sandy Hook conspiracies is not their content, but their presentation - my understanding is that they libel, and accuse victims of the shooting of conspiracy and murder. This is, by many definitions, harassment, and is against the TOS.
> The article I linked about Nazis are to explain the idea that censoring bad things can sometimes backfire.
If we really want to go down that tangent, may I remind you that this strategy of dealing with Nazis backfired spectacularly in 1933? We allowed them to speak, and big surprise, that did not stop them from suppressing the speech of their opposition, as soon as they seized power. Not that anything else could be expected from a movement that is built on no foundation but violence.
Tolerance is not a suicide pact. [1]
[1] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
I agree with you that Google should be able to omit whatever it wants, but I can't agree that "Shopping is not search". Google isn't directly making money on things people buy, it's selling ad space on its search engine. As best I can tell, the primary difference between "Shopping" and "Search" is that Shopping uses structured data from third parties while Search uses unstructured data and attempts to automatically determine semantic contents. From a consumer's perspective, it's still "search".
> Freedom of speech requires freedom from compelled speech.
As a libertarian (and a fairly extreme one at that), I completely agree with you. So would virtually all of my friends who consider themselves conservatives. Their immediate response to this argument would not be ideological, but practical - how is it fair to claim that Google has the right to refuse to participate in speech it deems inappropriate on one hand, while requiring a cake shop to produce a cake that vocally supports gay marriage?
This no longer seems like an issue of "should we compel people to participate in speech"; it's now an issue of "why do we compel speech in only some cases, all of which seem to align with the interests of the Democratic Party?"
> Google is not interested in making money from selling pornography.
This is exactly what I mean by the above. You can search for "porn" on Google Shopping today and get a variety of sexual devices modeled after the genitals of celebrity adult film actors. To my knowledge this has always been the case. As of last week, though, you couldn't get results for a "burgundy tank top" because that string contained the substring "gun".
Very few, if any, on the right are claiming that Google doesn't have the right to do what it wants with its own properties. What they're doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of aggressively blocking only what seems like only those things that are important to the "right", while simultaneously being seen as supporting using the power of government to force those on the right to bow to the demands of the left.
The bottom line is that the core value being exposed here for conservatives is "fairness". Regardless of whether the laws are moral or immoral, the perceived unequal application of those laws along ideological lines is antithetical to their worldview.
As best I can tell, "fairness" and "morality" are completely discrete concept to the right. Some on the right strongly believe that government has no place in legislating morality, others demand that they do so. Both of those groups, however, are outraged when they perceive that the power of government is being applied to the benefit of the left over the right.
From my libertarian perspective, it will be interesting to see how that is reconciled (or ignored) when it becomes general knowledge how the Trump administration has done the same from the other direction. It as, after all, what a large portion of his voters elected him to do. Will the right see it as "turnabout is fair play"? Will they take pleasure in placing the bootheel of government on the neck of the left the way they see it as having been applied to them? Maybe - just maybe - at the end of the day they will be unsettled enough by the implications of this that they'll demand that the power that has been given government and now used against both major ideological groups be revoked by whatever means necessary in order to prevent the escalation of the a cultural civil war where the power of the state itself is being used as the primary weapon.
I pray that it's the latter, but I honestly can't tell at this point.
Nobody had an inherent right to be heard on somebody else’s platform.
Same goes for Facebook.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that Google has this monopoly in the first place. Big monopolies and oligarchies are anathema to both democracy and to a free market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama could possibly set a precedent against your argument, right? If someone could sufficiently prove that Google's platform is big enough to cause meaningful harm to those who are censored off of it, Google could be treated differently than an average website.
Many of these are mere accusations, but nobody has any idea what's going on. Just a little tweak here and there can radically alter traffic patterns, search results, and knowledge discovery.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-shopping-bans-gun-sear...
[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/27/goog-j27.html
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-google-suggesti...
[4] https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2017/july/is-google-censorin...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-...
[6] http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/09/googles-new-fact-check-fea...
[7] https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/google-changes-search-r...
[8] https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2017/0223/Can-Google-AI...
Great piece on the connection between Google and the Democratic party and investigations into search result manipulation
It's really easy to pick what look like a powerfull target and accuse them of doing what you want in order to gain the exact same power, in fact just about every totalitarian state seams to have used that propaganda tacics.
It's much harder to come up with a coherent strategy to actually improve the situation to the point where no gatekeepers exist and people have real genuine material freedom rather then just immaterial freedom of a mostly fictional nature
Yes, primarily because the regulations regarding media, news, and other traditional entities haven't been applied to tech companies. That is slowly changing as the law is starting to catch up.
It took more than a decade to states to finally start taxing internet purchases across state lines (closing the "nexus loophole"). It will likely take years before we see meaningful regulation affecting google / amazon / fb
I.E. is the glorious past people look to by default when criticizing the Internet giants actually an society we want to return to, especially if we imagine ourselves as a citizens of somewhere who is not a de-facto colonial power.
I.E. what kind of regulation do you actually want and how much power are we willing to centralize inside the increasingly untrustworthy system of revolving doors that most governments seams to have been devolving into since the last war to end all wars ended.
I haven't been there physically but observed it from the distance. Google or not, wasn't the Silicon Valley of the 1990s more about creating new technologies and less about kissing VC asses, repackaging crap, pumping valuations, and screaming "innovation"?
* server-side web
* first web-based payments
* VoIP
* first mobile devices
* e-commerce
* text messaging
* music piracy... I mean, sharing
* search engines
And I could go on forever.
Edit: also what vadimberman said
They used to say ‘you never got fired for buying IBM’ but you also never took a beating for talking shit about IBM and there is a deep hacker tradition of that. We have a few more IBMs these days.
An ant becomes pretty scary when it grows to 100 feet tall.
One perspective is that monopolies are not inherently evil, because 1) It's a matter of perspective - what is Google a Monopoly in - advertising? Or web search? They may be completely dominant in web search, but they are a tiny player in web advertising in the grand scheme of things, which is interesting because that is their main business. 2) Monopolies are regularly supplanted by new monopolies, and provide stable financial ground upon which other "hard innovation," can happen, as with AT&T in the 50s and IBM in the 70s.
Of course, if you are someone like Theodore Rosevelt, then you would say, "trusts, a form of monopoly, are horrible, and more competition increases the amount of innovation, so therefore Google must be broken up." However if you are a Peter Thiel type ideological person, then you might say, "Yeah well, times change and monopolies will provide a huge amount of value for the time that they exist, and then they will inevitably die out, like Sears."
So, the conversation people are having around the world today, regardless of what is being talked about in Silicon Valley...is - has Silicon Valley (as a construct, rather than a physical place) created a feudalistic system, and should we create legislation to take that power and money away from them? Silicon Valley, similar to Wall Street (also a construct, not a physical place), will either innovate a way to maintain that power and convince the rest of the world that they are "not evil," or change the conversation in some way, or politics will keep moving in the direction where they eventually break up all the huge tech companies.
You can scream and say, "hey, we're not evil!" all you want - I'm not sure whether that communication strategy will work or not. Post 2008 folks on Wall Street seemed to have embraced the fact that they were perceived as evil and that they monopolize banking, and it seems that their power has been curtailed very little. I could see Mark Zuckerberg and all the tech execs coming out with a unified message saying, "yeah, online data isn't about us, it's about supporting millions of other small businesses, so an attack on cookies and pixels is an attack on freedom," - a similar tack that Wallstreet takes, and I could see people going forward in believing in that. Regardless of whether spying on people is actually evil, they could create some argument that it's a necessary evil, and therefore is not evil, and get anyone who might oppose them politically on their side, and hence we will continue forward in the United States having a completely separate legislative philosophy around data than Europe.
Are you forgetting that Google owns Doubleclick? Facebook and Google represent 63% (and growing) of internet advertising in the US.
It's not clear at all that Google will be safer from anti-trust investigation now that Thiel has political influence either:
> “Peter has indicated that if he takes the P.I.A.B. position he intends to take a comprehensive look at the U.S. intelligence community’s information-technology architecture. He is super-concerned about Amazon and Google”—and Facebook, less so. “He feels they have become New Age global fascists in terms of how they’re controlling the media, how they’re controlling information flows to the public, even how they’re purging people from think tanks. He’s concerned about the monopolistic tendencies of [all three] companies and how they deny economic well-being to people they disagree with.” When I asked this source how likely it is that Thiel will assume the post, he answered, “He’s heavily leaning toward it. He feels there’s a lot of good he can do and it’s worth putting up with all the bullshit and scrutiny that will accompany his appointment.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/donald-trump-peter-t...
1. Size is important: A mischievous kid can be cute, but a mischievous general can be terrifying.
2. Incentives: A small start-up has space to grow, in many cases, it's in its interest to be nice. A giant could be out of ways of to grow and, in many cases, hungry, it will bite the hand that fed them. In the case of Google, Facebook and company, could be their users.
Maybe it's the circumstances of the beast what have changed, instead of its nature but that's enough to deserve some criticism.
4. Mottos matter: if you explicitely remove the tenet to not be evil, and replace it with doing the right thing. You open up a lot more wiggle room philosophically. Right for whom? society? shareholders? employees? advertisers? advertisees? the company?
Part of the problem with google is that they have the same problem that all advertising supported products have, in that there is a misalignment of incentives for people who use the product. In the end they harvest eyeball (or earballs) (or personal data) to sell to advertisers, this means there is big incentive to do things that the eyeballs don't like. The best newspapers have historically tried to counter this problem by segregating advertising and editorial, and promoting a culture where advertising has no say in the stories that get run. But the tension is always there, and I'm positive 'do the right thing' does not have enough context to encourage siding with the eyeball at every opportunity, and I think the corruption has started to take hold.
> Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.
Everything is about attacking a big company?
The motivation behind attacking tech giants (at least in my case when I bash Google or whatever), is mostly to show others how ethic I am and consequently to feel good about my worldview. This is, virtue signaling in purest form.
Meanwhile, I'll stop my signalling hamster for a moment to say that Google has maybe been the single biggest net positive to the society among all corporations ever, mainly because of the ease of access to information that Search provides, that propelled Internet to became ubiquitous and grease many wheels of information storage and transfer that were mostly manual and hard to scale (this is, to broadcast to many people at once).
This new paradigm has his problems, disruption of previous model of society being one, but is the best way forward I know.
Maybe not, but its capacity to do evil has changed dramatically. Size matters. Absolute power - in citizen data and web advertising - corrupts absolutely.
I'd say that power corrupts even the most well intentioned and that history has many examples of this. I don't see how tech is differently immune.
* How Amazon is evil: They lure people into buying from them, soon you will only be able to buy from them and the damage will be felt; they create addicting home surveillance devices that pretend to be helpful ?
* How Apple is evil: They engineer a basic necessity to break down every 18 months, they introduce progressively more useless "features" into their new products, they rapidly change standards in order to force people to buy stupid connectors, they no longer create amazing products? [Really is this evil?]
* Exactly HOW is Google doing evil now? The only argument I can see is that they collect a lot of information about you which they plan to use later. They still provide a quintessential information service. You can avoid their ads very easily.
1. AMP is eating the open web https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-amp/ 2. The youtube algorithm leads users "down hateful rabbit holes." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu... 3. Google is using monopolistic practices to favor its own products. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...
Google builds its image recognition algorithm using Google Photos, Google trains its driving algorithms using Google Maps, Google trains its NLP algorithms using Google Home. None of this is explicitly told to its "free" users. I'm starting to think the training data I'm providing is worth more than what I am receiving (free photo storage, traffic info, voice controls).
Side note: Elon Musk recognizes the advantages these big tech companies have in this area which is why OpenAI exists. It's not some altruistic endeavor - it's Elon trying to catch up to the big boys or bring them down to his level with Government regulation and/or spreading FUD.
Until they are regulated, they will proceed doing so with little regard to our privacy and mental health. GDPR is looking good.
All the apologists here disgust me.