Hacker News Reader

> People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this could certainly be true but my bullshit meter is going off on the level of narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-quoted portions.

This is not an editorial document, it’s a legal complaint by the Attorneys General of 17 U.S. states and commonwealths demanding a jury trial (among other things). The allegations are unproven at this point. The demanded trial process (discovery, examination, etc.) is what will provide the evidence.

One way or another though, we’re going to see if all of these claims are true. It just will take some time.

> This is not an editorial document, it’s a legal complaint by the Attorneys General

It's definitely both, they know their audience is not limited to the court. Performative filings by attorneys general happen all the time, and being able to set the narrative and put the other party on the defensive is absolutely part of this process, for good or bad.

>This is not an editorial document, it’s a legal complaint by the Attorneys General of 17 U.S. states and commonwealths demanding a jury trial (among other things).

While I agree that Google is anticompetitive, I don't think that specific detail gives as much weight as you think it does (or indeed should). The courts have had a notoriously bad history with understanding tech, and being part of a formal legal process is only weak evidence that a complaint has merit.

I don't think that was necessarily meant to convey weight towards a position of belief, but instead to just clarify the situation. They immediately followed up with "the allegations are unproven" and "we'll eventually see".

Bullshit meter?

It seems to me this is yet another validation that Google is an ad sales company hell bent on preventing competition, controlling the market and lying to end users and integrators. All of these pieces are adding up - what was conjecture is finally being validated and I, personally, believe that Google is not in it for the good of the customer, but are only in it for a profit. Death to Google by thousands of cuts like this? Game on.

I've said it before, sales organizations only base performance on profit. It is the toxin that defines all of this misbehaviour. Nobody "thinks" they're doing anything wrong because it's talked about as benefiting the shareholder. Google isn't immune to this.

> It seems to me this is yet another validation

That's just what I mean. There's a tiny amount of validation and a lot of rhetoric. It would be preferable to be able to see the actual sources they're quoting from.

Just because the floodgates haven't opened with all of the insight you may want doesn't mean it's not valid - re: "bullshit meter".

Google has an army of the best in legal and part of their play is limiting this information from ever being seen. I'm curious, what would be enough validation to pass your sniff test? And are you saying you think this is being overblown?

> I'm curious, what would be enough validation to pass your sniff test?

From my first post:

> but this would be a lot more convincing with the source emails entered into the record

:)

That's what discovery is for. You don't usually see evidence like that in the initial filings.

Validation? What else you want validated as I can whip up a doc with some claims about things without source/proof too.

>"People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph."

The pdf that this page links to includes much more than two sentence fragments on the topic.

But not the documents these quotes come from, as far as I can tell.

I agree, but this seems pretty typical for an initial filing. They don't typically show all their cards. So snippets like:

>Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.”

Could be more, or less interesting, when the actual source document is published.

There's some more detail in a highly redacted document here: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

"In Google’s words, the [redacted] program [redacted]. Next, Google tried to come up with other creative ways to shut out competition from exchanges in header bidding. During one internal debate, a Google employee proposed a [redacted]. A second employee captured Google’s ultimate aim of destroying header bidding altogether, noting in response that [redacted]"

> A second employee captured Google’s ultimate aim of destroying header bidding altogether, noting in response that [redacted]

So from a probably naive view, getting rid of header bidding seems like it would be faster, not slower. Is the assertion being made that it isn't faster and it just so happens to also enrich the ad network?

Yes, you're right. It's faster not to have it, but that puts publishers at a disadvantage...Google reaps more revenue and gives less in return if it doesn't exist. Header bidding is often estimated to improve revenue by 10% or so for publishers.

The sequence was first employee probably said something like "make it slower if they aren't on AMP", and the second employee made some kind of suggestion to kill it altogether.

If you need to keep revenue graphs going up and to the right, because that's the primary KPI your unit is judged on, at some point it's technically easier to handicap competition than improve your own offering.

I think this gives us a timestamp on when Google got there.

It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to bad places. The YoY growth of end users is much smaller. Something like 5%. So at some point, the inflated expectations have to mean a dirty playbook.

Well, and nobody normally wakes up and says "I'm going to bend the law really hard and create a potential PR disaster, just because."

They do often say "My bonuses are tied to growth, and my management is putting extreme pressure on me to deliver something that's impossible, and I don't see any way of delivering it in the expected time... so I'm going to do it the only way I see."

> It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to bad places

Yeah it seems bizarre that they would try to hold on to that big of growth and not moderate it if this is the method to get it because there's no way it can be sustainably grown for long, but I guess if you're a VP only focused on this quarter's goals and the bonus you'll get out of it, it doesn't really much matter if growth craters a year or two out. You can cash out long before then.

>Or more accurately, the analogy would be if [redacted] were a monopoly financial broker and owned the [redacted] which was a monopoly stock exchange.

Can someone who has a better understand of legal proceedings explain what purpose these redactions serve?

The unredacted document is here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...