Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
bbc.com
bbc.com
Every single one of these predates Pichai, who only became CEO in 2015:
* Google Wave was already turned down in 2012
* Google Plus launched in 2011 and the writing was on the wall by 2015
* Google Glass consumer edition was discontinued in Jan 2015 before Pichai started
* Loon is the only arguable exception; it was started in 2011 but only promoted into an official Bet during Pichai's tenure in 2018. However, it was also an experiment from day 1, not "the next big thing" like Wave/Plus/Glass were supposed to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say."
The last 4 years of US politics (and 20? of UK politics) have given the lie to that belief.
[edit: added UK politics because they're just as bad]
So many AI models have been ridiculed for the same flaw - learning correlations.
There are currently 15 parties to vote for here in Denmark, with a government on average being based on 2-3 of them. A single person rarely get more votes than 1% in our elections because most vote for the party, not the person.
People distrust politicians ... except. Except for their favorite politician, except for their party, except for the ones they voted for, except...
You see this with Congress writ large. People hate Congress, its approval ratings are through the floor. But they like their own Congresspeople. Sure, gerrymandering, safe districts, etc, but by and large people are much happier with their own Representatives than everyone else's.
As I wrote in another reply I believe this to be A Very American Thing. At least I have never heard of anyone here (in Denmark) seeing themselves as represented by a person. It is more of a party thing. I'm sure I live in a bubble (don't we all) so my experience might not match any official numbers but in my experience people seem to just change to another party at the next election if they feel the representation does not match their expectation. This likely makes it easier not to get caught up in having to defend a specific person that "can do no wrong". But again, I have not looked it up and it is all based on my own experience and intuition. I do know that election day sees a much higher turnout here (~%85) than in the US (>65%?) though, but is it related to distrusting politicians? Who knows.
This might be a parliamentary democracy thing. In the US, everything is about borders and leaders. You're happy with corrupt politicians because corrupt politicians are connected politicians, and they might bring benefits to your state/district.
In short, every politician is trustworthy to the people who voted for them, but not the rest- kindof an inverse of the effect, really.
Let's not act like news readers or politicians are different sorts of humans than anyone else.
Google Plus and Google Glass were big bets in my view. That doesn't take away from Google being unscrupulous in ending unsuccessful offerings. That's part of what made them succesful, I assume.
Journalists often use hyperbole or simplify complex facts to deliver an interesting and easily understandable story. That doesn't make every sinplification a gross misrepresentation.
You're free to dive deeper into any topic you want, but it's delusional to expect every reader to be an expert in every field.
Bashing journalism as a whole has become common gospel, but to me it seems that the effect of that thinking is not that people become better informed.
The article sounds Google-friendly and uncritical to me, but it's also very common to cover interviews in a way that represents the views of the interviewed person.
Wouldn't it make more sense to study the field and sort journalists into groups based on their performance over time? Even casual sports fan do that kind of work reflexively. I don't get why journalism should be treated any different, and I especially don't get the desire to find an anecdote that could reject the entire field out of hand.
Put differently-- if Glenn Greenwald publishes another leak-based story about state-level corruption, I'll read it and ascribe more veracity to him than I will Crichton's cocktail story. I'll bet you a dollar that when/if I do that, nothing bad will happen as a result.
Plus was Larry's and Vic's baby.
> He's been responsible for a lot of Google products.
He might have been responsible but i wouldn't call those projects as Pichai's big bets.
for about a year, so still after all those dates. I'd guess Wave fell into his previous responsibility though.
Not sure I understand that distinction. If I label all my projects as experiments, do I also get to escape culpability for their failure while loading on the self-praise when they succeed?
By contrast, Wave, Plus and Glass were all consumer products from the mothership that were heavily hyped as being the Next Big Thing that would revolutionize work/IM, social networks and mobile phones respectively.
1. Can you get wi-fi reception on the ground from a balloon? How big a transmitter, how big a power source, how long can you keep it going for, and how much weight do you need to spend on batteries for this?
2. Will your wi-fi reception cut out if a tall building happens to pass between you and the balloon? How do you mitigate this? Do you need duplicate coverage from multiple balloons? (Starlink is dealing with this now.)
3. How do you keep the balloons in one place, or at least control where they go? If one goes out of range, how do you make sure there's another covering all its receivers?
4. How much propellant/battery can you carry on the balloon for course adjustments? How long can it stay aloft before this is exhausted?
5. Where do the winds go in the stratosphere? If the balloons are not propelled, where will they end up? Can you use altitude changes to get into different jet-streams and reduce propellant use?
6. How do you respect country's airspace? How do you avoid causing international incidents? If a balloon does come down, how do you ensure it doesn't harm anyone and can be retrieved? Early in the project, Loon had an ops team of former navy SEALs whose job was to retrieve any crashed balloons without starting any wars.
And I wasn't even on the team - this is just what I got from a few lunchtime conversations. They had to invent new algorithms, first to model the wind systems in the stratosphere and then to optimize balloon placement given that wind. I know their CTO - he's got a Ph.D in stochastic optimal control (pretty appropriate for this problem). The math behind control theory, once you get past simple PID controllers, is hard.
That you need a team of NAVY SEALs to clean up your messes is a sign you're doing it wrong.
After working at Google for 12 years, I am always amazed at how people talk up their projects as risky when really, there's little or no risk involved, and the majority of the problems are political or social opposition to your plans, as well as the lack of a business model.
Sure, if your funding sources are okay with spending 100% on a high-variance, low-hit-rate manner of output. Every single Google earnings call I've been on has the CEO reassuring investors about their high-risk "moonshots", emphasizing that they're only 5% of Google's budget. You'll note that the parent comment didn't use that reason to justify the other failures, which were not explicitly classified pre hoc as high-risk experiments.
I'm not sure how you think the answer could be anything other than yes. If you were working on high-risk moonshot private projects and either self-funding them or being funded by someone comfortable with the risk of your endeavor, do you think you _wouldn't_ "escape culpability" yet be rewarded for successes?
(Note also that you're using an extremely odd definition of "escaping culpability". Moonshots failing is the _expected_ outcome, and pointing that out isn't helping anyone "escape culpability".
It’s extremely tempting, especially to technical people, to believe that some piece of technology will create net freedom and equality.
The reality is more mundane: technology is just a fancy word for tool, and the only thing the guillotine ever freed anyone from was tomorrow.
It's a subtle but critical shift in the drivers of the industry at an individual level, and it bubbles up through the firms those individuals build and try to sustain.
Nevertheless, as much as there are heaps of shit on the internet - digital surveillance, bottomless wells of inane addiction, hateful discourse, etc. - I’d say there is a net benefit overall, and where the 90s techno-optimists were merely wrong was in degree and concrete detail.
I think 2) gets underestimated a lot - 10 years ago you could recognize a lot of stupid comments by the fact that they capitalized every word or the grammar and spelling were horrific. Those people didn't stop posting, they learned how to express themselves well through practice.
Just because there are parts of the internet like social media of questionable net positive impact, the sum total utility of the web for humanity has been an overwhelming positive. It's hard to see good things when you're thinking about bad ones. Take a step back.
There was a brief moment in time where P2P looked like the future, but a lot of powerful wheels turn against it.
To your point, business and the desire for control ultimately trumped what was technically possible.
Did you just come up with that? :O
>Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Freedom fighter vs terrorist is merely a question of narrative.
The difference is that Internet/WWW also involved some degree of technical and creative understanding, whereas twaddlevision is passive absorption.
All told, I would say the the Internet/WWW is progress. But like any human progress, there is a deplorable waste of opportunity.
Here's the other envelope:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528350
The modern day equivalent to the old internet isn't YouTube or Facebook. That's the equivalent to Cable TV.
It's rather the private Discords, Signal groups and maker spaces, grassroots efforts like EleutherAI and what other cool stuff young (and old) people are doing these days.
Depending on how close you look, 2021 internet is everything as cool as it used to be in 1990. And yes, I was there.
The vast majority of it is crap. Always was. There's also a ton of things you'll like, but finding the things that you like but not popular with everybody else is a matter of sifting through (a) the things that everybody likes and (b) the things some people like but not you. Those two things make up 99.999% of the world.
The form and function of the tool have a significant impact on its use.
If installing & maintaining a home server (just a domain name and static content like vacation pictures) were as simple as setting up a fridge, more people would probably run home servers.
I remember using IRC, Lynx browser, Unix Talk in the 1990s and being genuinely impressed. I feel the same excitement with Crypto after many years.
Decentralized trust, pseudonymous identity and device-to-device communication will change the Internet for the better in the coming decade.
There is reason for optimism.
waves hand
I got online in 1991. Spent faaarrrrr time much time on Usenet. Almost got in trouble at my university for figuring out how to post to alt.hackers. I ran a computer lab, cannibalized some old IIcis, installed FreeBSD, got httpd running to spin up one of the first servers on campus. I debated with friends if WWW was that different from gopher. (I wrongly maintained it wasn't.)
I'm absolutely blown away by what the Internet has become today. It's far more amazing than I think anything any of us imagined. Yes, it's far from perfect, but to me the pros far, far, far outweigh the cons.
To wit, a NYT reporter wrote an article about how it was "impossible" to live without the Internet. The tone was clearly to condemn the Internet, but I found it applauded it. She essentially lamented how difficult life was without it. One example was the challenges of finding a place without Google Maps. It wasn't impossible -- it was basically what all of us had to do in the 90s -- but her standard had risen so much, what we considered "normal" she now considered impossible.
It sometimes seems like Google’s internal self-image is stuck in 2001, when they were an idealistic search engine company whose goal was to organize the world’s information.
Today they are an ad company, running some office apps and cloud computing on the side. The transition has been great for revenue but it seems like they long ago sold the moral authority to make pronouncements about the free and open Internet.
They do. They want an Internet where they control the flow of information.
Everything you listed has maximum profits when there is a free and open internet, which is something Google depends on to reach its users.
ISPs, on the other hand, can approve service providers this via prioritization, or DNS-/traffic-level blocking. Google was cognizant early, which is why it became a fervent "net neutrality" supporter.
1. I cannot think of anything else that could bring down anti-trust regulation faster than Google angling to be the sole service provider for an entire market
2. "better" being measured by market success.
I find it grotesquely comical to even see this headline with Sundar Pichai's name attached to it.
With that in mind, it seems most comments appear along the lines of a response to the title and not the content and is just going to clog Dang up with work.
I personally found the aspect and questioning about corporation TAX more insightful and perhaps would of been a better sound-bite of a title.
> When I invited Pichai to commit there and then to Google pulling out of all tax havens immediately, he didn't take up the offer.
> In a very revealing quick-fire round of questions, we discover he doesn't eat meat, drives a Tesla, reveres Alan Turing, wishes he'd met Stephen Hawking, and is jealous of Jeff Bezos's space mission.
The headline really is irrelevant to the majority of the interview, but I really wouldn't be surprised if he personally signed off that headline to run with from the interview (the same was used on the television news). He's a former newspaper editor after all.
This form of journalism is what I thought was starting to be considered old fashioned. I don't understand how he became the BBC's Media Editor and host of the most prestigious morning radio programme on the BBC, apart from having loads of connections and history in the publishing industry.
Its always the largest companies with the largest share and encrusted monopolies the first ones talking about "freedom", "leveling the playing field", and providing "equal opportunities for all".
They do that because they know that only regulatory measures can temper their current abuses. If there is a "level playing field" any other parameters of the game where they already have advantages will keep the outcomes biased in their direction.
The discussion on internet freedom is a diversion on what should be seen as the main item out of the interview. Sadly this being a BBC interview, as usual it was kind of a softball...
Here is a "level playing field" where the CEO from Google refused to commit to....Special Tax structures. When challenged did not commit to stop using tax havens.
At 47 min and 17 sec of the Podcast... https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09nxhrd
Start from the beginning. You think Sundar just gets a call one day from a reporter about this topic and says “yeah, I’ll do an interview”?
This article was generated by google. Their internal PR team thought it up and used their external agency to float the idea of the article (and an interview with Sundar!) to a bunch of reporters until someone took the bait (well, not bait, the reporter knows what’s up).
And this is a small slice of the overall strategy google has put together to counter the antitrust action the US govt is pushing.
PS. Include mega-corps in 'nation states' above. They both want total control over the Internet. They will get it too, in some proportion. Because truly democratic forces are too weak and disorganised, as always.
Edit: two reasons:
1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large.
2) Google is doing everything it can to protect and defend their control over said adtech, using all mechanisms at its disposal including a monopoly on Search, almost a monopoly (and veto power) on what defines HTML (Blink not Chrome), and like 70% of mobile platform.
Because they are so dominate they exercise outsized control, but there are still a few others.
Data behind paywalls/logins is useless to them.
The end result: As the web Google stole from dies off, Google increasingly has worse, less accurate sources it has to draw from.
Journalists are at the forefront of this, and you can see several countries moving to charge Google for lifting news content to combat this. But there's a lot of other sources on the web that probably won't be so lucky.
Look at the google vs duckduckgo search results for this: "How a Convicted Terrorist used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Website to Identify Targets"
Sites are often not behind a paywall if you reach them via google (and only google).
Google makes money selling ads yes, but their core product is search. Like a newspaper, which does journalism, and also has an ad department, or a TV show, with ad breaks, or a sports broadcast.
Do people think Google makes their search worse to... sell fewer ads?
Its not search.
A newspaper’s primary purpose is to inform the public, and make money while doing so.
Googles primary purpose is not search, and to make money while doing so.
Googles primary purpose is collect and sell data, and make money while doing so.
If the primary purpose was ada, then it would stop all of the wasteful spending on engineering projects with no relation to, and no hope of, making ad money.
Google is in the business of collecting data and selling advertising using that data. For the purpose of making money.
Search hasn’t been part of their purpose in decades.
Let me ask you this, has search gotten better or worse in the last 5 - 10 years? Has their data collection gotten more invasive or less over the last 5 - 10 years?
I think we both know what kind of company Google is once those questions are answered.
But since you asked: Compare Google search engine results over nearly two decades and a trend emerges: Results are filled with advertising and non-Google results are lower down. https://wapo.st/3dHj2Xf
There are firms which evaluate search quality by employing a huge corpus of queries and human raters. I trust those more than someone running a single query for a commercial search.
The reality is, the Web didn't stay static. If Google 2020 used the same exact search algorithm as Google of 2000, the results would be worse, because of all of the massive amount of noise and spam that's been added to the web since then, to say nothing of adversarial attacks. Google of 2020 is doing a hell of a lot to maintain freshness, index an exponentially bigger web, and defeat pretty much an army of blackhat SEO adversaries from spoiling it.
It's like saying Email spam is worse in Gmail or other clients. Compared to what? 30 years ago, there wasn't much spam being sent and spammers were unsophisticated. The fact that you see almost none these days, but still a few slip through, compared to standard IMAP in 1993 is irrelevent, because the email population was tiny back then.
I'll admit that the product search category in queries has over-the-top ads. But then again, this is the one area where even going back to 2000 era, Sergey and Larry justified ads by saying say that serving up keyword based ads is in a way, satisfying query intent. If I type in "toyota cars" and I get ads for 3 toyota car dealerships nearby, why is this completely wrong? It's very likely a strong buy signal.
Personally, when I'm doing product search, I go straight to Amazon, or I use Shopping.google.com (or Froogle back in the old days)
I can do my own cherry picking. For example, when looking for actual information, especially long tail information, Google search is way better than it was in the early 2000s, and unmatched by things like DDG.
Compare long-tail search vs DuckDuckGo. Try for example "the movie where a robot kid flies a spy plane". Google returns D.A.R.Y.L as top item. DDG doesn't even have it in the top 10. This is way bette than it was in 2000.
"who wrote the c64 game mule". DDG just gives me Wikipedia. Google gives me the Answer + Wikipedia plus related games to explore.
Or try "what is the moment of inertia of a disk", on DDG the snippet displayed in the first result is far less useful than the snippet Google displays. Plus Google shows actual diagrams in the results too.
Look, I'll be the first to admit they increased the # of ads for some queries (mostly product search, real estate, travel, etc) and are using questionable dark patterns that make ads harder to discern from non-ad content. But quite obviously to me, the non-ad query results have gotten ALOT better from 20 years ago, and it's just false memory nostalgia about how queries use to work on a much smaller, and non-commercial web, that thinks they were better.
I've been on the internet/web since the 80s. It was a marvelous time in the old days before commercialization, but also in many ways, it was far less useful and worse.
I’ve only been on the web since the mid-late 90s, but it has changed so much for the worse, perhaps not in usefulness, but in… Idealsim? I remember reading the hacker manifesto and it moving me. That crappy little text inspired so much in me. I just hope that in todays overly commercial, algorithmically driven, ML curated world, there is room for life changing chance encounters.
This explains user-hostile deprecations like newsgroup search (a literal search engine they bought and abandoned), RSS Reader, etc.
In addition, the ever-decreasing visual distinction between organic search results and ads on Google SERPs is well documented. As is the ever-increasing encroachment of data collection into all their products. Look at how Chrome works with Google accounts now vs 5 or 10 years ago.
Google went from a search engine company who runs ads so they can afford to keep building cool things, to an ad company that runs a search engine because it provides provide data and inventory for its ad network.
This was literally an interview by a real reporter, edited into an article. You might not like that the interviewer wasn't antagonistic (let's be real — most aren't!), but this is not a "PR submarine piece" by any sane definition of the phrase.
Does this mean any article about Google that does not criticize Google deserves this snark? Fwiw the snark is annoying not because folks disagree with it, but that saying it again and again and doing nothing is a trite form of internet me-too-ing or signalling. That Google depends on an ethically dubious set of assumptions is obvious; now how do we fix it and why are we talking about this here?
All right, then, enlighten us with your top ten. And if you haven’t already, I’d like to see where on the top ten you’ve put regimes like the Chinese government and the US government.
Google would have a walled garden if they could afford to lose the users and manufacturers that would revolt against it.
They lose the most if the internet balkanizes.
By balkanising the internet they can have a monopoly over offering ads to certain target groups that fall within their walled garden.
Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around. When they do that they put up some fences to make the experience a bit more like walled gardens, but the open web is still just a few seconds and a click away.
That's why Google instead reshapes the web as Google sees fit.
> Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around
No. It subsumes the web and replaces it with all things Google. It dominates all web-related standards bodies, pushes through half-baked Chrome-only APIs as "standards" and then presents them as fait accompli through Google-controlled properties like web.dev.
Facebook scored the mortal wound on the web — they reinvented a bigger, badder AOL closed garden.
Most of my searches result in a wall of sales or product pages. Hardly 'open' when they turned it into glorified yellow pages
These companies -- all of them -- are fucking with each other. None of us matter in the end. It's all about which company can screw the other out of engagement and eyeballs.
Meanwhile Firefox, the open web, open source, right to repair, and digital ownership all wither away.
Well that is kind of how media companies compete against each other, but the key question is: is it beneficial or harmful to the public?
You could argue that Apple is acquiring users who they then lock in, sell to advertisers and developers (for a 30% cut on the App store) and monetize with service subscriptions, but you can also argue that half of Apple's profit is still from hardware sales, that apps and services are a big reason for buying that hardware, so Apple is still beholden to its hardware customers to some extent.
And Google has https://wellbeing.google as well as associated features in Android, and Apple has also implemented "screen time" tracking and limits.
Fixed it for you.
It seems lately that Google has just become Yet Another Large Software Firm, with everything that that implies.
EDIT: typo
This. This right here.
A real hero knows when to resist the fear and borrow the power from the giants.
I don't think we need a real hero here, we need end-user solidarity perhaps in the form of public policy and market regulation. Humans would have more freedom on the internet if corporate giants didn't.
Just because it's what's "always" happened before, doesn't mean we can't do better.
This being the case is the very driving force of any innovation.
Your statement seems like defeatism wrapped in a pretty bow of faux-insight.
A tendency toward giants is also not necessarily a sustainable state of affairs.
Once technology becomes sufficiently advanced and pervasive, the window of time available for a giant to gestate, before the next giant-level disruption, inevitably shrinks to the point the system reaches an equilibrium of innovational equanimity and balance.
This is ordinary and expected, and parallels can be seen anywhere in nature.
The - relatively-brief - "time of giants" of human progress may soon be coming to a close.
This statement is an oxymoron.
"Tech giants" hobble the open principles of the internet by their own existence, persistence and, by-definition, over-bearing influence.
Any entity genuinely concerned with preserving open principles would seek to limit its growth far-prior to where Google is now, and eliminate the pervasiveness of its influence, favouring and encouraging the results of diverse decentralisation over narrow centralisation.
Google and Facebook are the antithesis of everything the concept of an open internet stands for.
If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.
You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.
Good luck. The magic of the internet is that everything is public and interlinked.
Usually within a company the incentives are such that information is more tightly controlled. A software engineer doesn't see purchase orders and an HR specialist doesn't see software assignments. Usually a directory is more useful than a search within a company. Obviously there are exceptions.
> And, when I asked about whether the Chinese model of the internet - much more authoritarian, big on surveillance - is in the ascendant, Pichai said the free and open internet "is being attacked". Importantly, he didn't refer to China directly but he went on to say: "None of our major products and services are available in China."
Google does run at least one semi-independent group to tackle such censorship, disinformation, propaganda, and abuse https://jigsaw.google.com/
Throughout this report we use the term “toxicity,” defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion. We specifically use the term toxicity, as opposed to words like “abuse” or “hate speech” for both practical and scientific reasons.
Scientific reasons? There's nothing scientific about a term so undefined that every person can have their own custom definition.
Not everyone in the world has equal financial power as a US citizen.
Lots of my URLs were either "Discovered – currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed", but spam sites are happily searchable with the exact same content. And I don't want spend to fight SEO.
You create enough Byzantine rules that basically only the largest company can hire the lawyers and comply. It’s an effective way to kill off competition.
Google is ready to start encouraging regulation.
I'd argue its people running their own servers - traditionally an x86 (plus RAM, disk, modem pipe and power) running a POSIX kernel running httpd, smptd, ftpd and maybe ircd. A static IPv4 address from ARIN (via an ISP) and a DNS name from ICANN (via a registrar).
These are the necessary ingredients you must have, as an individual or a group, to participate in the "free and open internet".
I'd argue that Facebook is just a natural extension of AWS, Digital Ocean or Github pages. Facebook takes away the DNS name, and they take away your content and put it behind an algorithm, which you can bribe to let your stuff through. I'd consider a difference of degree, not kind.
Even those who go to the trouble of running their own physical server still use services like Google Analytics, which violate the privacy of every data consumer. Maybe not as bad as putting your data behind someone else's paywall and then paying them to expose it, but it's pretty bad. Since we use the web for literally every application now, it's a particularly worrying trend.
My point is that if you want a 'free and open internet' then you need to make it easy for people own, understand and run ALL of these ingredients. Like, provide them by all by default for everyone's smartphone, and run servers on your smartphone! And give them reasonable defaults, with a first-year-free DNS name. A free static IPv6 address block. Default, svelte, little mobile friendly server daemons. Then let people make crazy HTML documents with their voice and self-publish them like in the old days!
All the components are there, we just need to DO it.
(I could provide links to studies, but I like to think the downvotes prove my point for me)
There're lots of things about HN that make it better than many other fora, but its collective wild-eyed, frothing reaction to literally the word Google is not one of them. You may as well be on 4chan for threads like these
This might as well be a place to talk about Google in general, or Pichai in general irt "internet freedom."
There is a whole lot of things they did right (and do right), only they are now often messing up even basics.
There is no free and open internet, and Google is part of the group of corporations that help prop up the big tech cartel that help kill off each others' competitors, share employee blacklists, and intentionally sacrifice the quality of their product to push their Bay Area bourgeoisie politics around the globe.
On another note does anybody else notice the inherent contradiction and massive exploitability of the "state propaganda is a threat" line that is so common? Deciding what speech from foreign governments goes against their agenda and declaring it a threat is itself propaganda.
That's not ruled out. Big tech employs thousands of people who may or may not be bought out to cover the tracks of authoritarians, even if we assume (absurdly) that their leadership are saints.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-...
> structurally convenient
Social media are centralized, have no direct interest in the stability of the country they operate in, are not in any control from the users of the target country, are perceived as neutral by said users, YET they are in control of the government where they operate in, and certain countries often run campaigns targetted against their own citizens. They generally don't investigate such actions until after the fact, and in fact i ve only seen facebook doing somewhat serious attempts to catch them in the act e.g. https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-coordinated-inaut...
> [Sundar Pichai] says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted.
Like when Google, with more influence than most countries, censors content on YouTube or the Google App Store? Google’s manipulation of information amounts to political propaganda to those who aren’t aligned with their prevailing views - naturally many countries will balk at letting that kind of foreign interference/control influence their own societies.
And I can’t help but view Pichai’s perspective on taxes as a form of convenient regulatory capture / barrier to competition:
> I put this to Pichai, who said that Google no longer uses this scheme, is one of the world's biggest taxpayers, and complies with tax laws in every country in which it operates.
The article also talks about the activist streak of Google and its employees but doesn’t challenge it:
> With more than 100,000 staff, many of them hugely opinionated on internal message boards, and activist in nature, this is just impossible to control. There is a tension between Google genuinely embracing cognitive diversity by having people of all persuasions among its global staff, and at the same time really standing up for particular issues as a company.
I don’t think this tension is actually present. Google is a dyed in the wool Bay Area tech company. I don’t think it has employees of “all persuasions” in any great numbers unless they are looking at only the left side of the American political spectrum.
Executive interviews tend to lean more towards press releases than journalism.
Disclaimer: I worked at Google for 12 years.
He's a great CEO. Has no outspoken opinion about anything yet maximizes financial results. It's what Google needs at this phase of its life cycle.
The article dares to even call him an idealist.
How so? He's too afraid to even directly mention the China issue, let alone take any responsibility for it. If you're too afraid to concretely even mention a human rights issue, how are you an idealist?
When mildly pressed for their tax misbehavior, the comeback is that they no longer use the double dutch construction. An idealist would apologize for even ever using it, and pay back what you dodged. Instead, we're supposed to be happy that they pay some bare minimum now, which...get this...is more than most companies.
How generous.
An idealist has principles, stands for something, and will defend doing the right thing at any and all costs. He's the opposite of an idealist.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
For example "He says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted." Shifts any blame elsewhere in a way that does not detail this model or outlines any of the issues that define the restrictions and how they effect Google. So for all we know, he could be on about data protection laws like GDPR or the like and paints them as bad without going into any details of the pro's or con's.
Remember some law/restriction that is bad for Google may actually be good for the users.
Also when I see the term "free internet" I do feel it is a misnomer in many ways, more so in the context it is used.
It is really quite sad how Google's formerly excellent search product, has morphed into a tool for censorship, and surveillance capitalism, and in the process, degraded its accuracy significantly.
An internet driver's license is a terrible technically illiterate idea trying to cast itself as something reasonable. Who can I run over with my internet connection? How the hell would anybody check who is behind a terminal in the privacy of their own home? It would require somehow embedding an actual identifier in every last packet and ensuring it is always valid and isn't susceptible to replay or known plaintext attacks.