Hacker News Reader

Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

> Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!

When Google was a startup and even a decade in they managed to treat everyone the same.

Today this has went backwards like everything else Google it seems.

The problem of being a massive company is that everyone wants to sue you. They could want to sue you for money. Or maybe sue you because they think you are bad. Whatever the reason, when you're Google's size, you need to make sure you're compliant with every local regulation before you launch anything or someone may come after you.

Googler, opinions are my own.

If that worries Google, they should fix the cookie options on the Google I/O page on the frontpage.

It is wildly noncompliant, and Google should be sued over it like they were over the same thing in YouTube in France.

> If that worries Google, they should fix the cookie options on the Google I/O page on the frontpage.

> It is wildly noncompliant, and Google should be sued over it like they were over the same thing in YouTube in France.

this really reinforces GP's point

It does not since Google is maliciously and purposefully non-compliant with that one. It instead reinforces the point that they don't care too much about being sued.

Google is the only company that does this. Even product pages are geo-dodged in a similar fashion, as if the technical specs for a Pixel phone shouldn't be readable outside of some approved areas and the user is silently redirected to an unrelated page. It's quite surprising.

More than once, I've had to use a VPN to order a Google device from abroad (shipment to country A, paid with a credit card from country A, while currently physically located in neighboring country B). It's beyond ridiculous.

At least the Google Store now has a country selection switch, but I suspect that that also only happened due to new EU regulations requiring them to do so.

Surprising that when it came time to restructure they didn’t adopt a model where the parent company (alphabet) owns all of the infrastructure and provide services to many independent smaller initiatives that would then be much less constrained.

If they are unwilling to let go of the Google brand (understandable!) then the parent company perhaps should have been called Google.

How is fragmenting the internet good for Google?

I'm always surprised when people that work at company X talks about practices at company X.

Even innocent sounding replies can surface later and cause legal or PR headaches for the company. If one person out of 10,000 says something about XYZ, it is way too easy for it to taken as the truth, adding even more burden the legal/PR problems that every big company is constantly managing.

Such a US-centric way of thinking. Not every country is as sue-happy as the US.

What absolute nonsense.

This is a list of countries just off the top of my head that has sued Google in the last decade:

    United States
    European Union (which consists of multiple member states)
    Australia
    France
    Germany
    Italy
    Spain
    Russia
    India
    Brazil
    South Korea
    Turkey
    Canada

It's not only past incidents. At some point you've had enough trouble that you shift your stance from "we don't know about any issues in that region" to "we haven't gone through our approval process with legal for that region".

My current country isn't on that list. Obviously, you're missing well over a hundred countries on that list.

In today’s episode of “people from countries that create nothing whining about not having access to other countries’ technologies”…

I suspect you like watching DVDs and using your Bluetooth headphones while connected to your WiFi?

Goal posts: moved

The members of the EU are countries, not states (& the EU itself is a political/economic alliance, not a country).

"State" in this context is the same as the state in "head of state," AKA "a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government." Other examples of this usage are "nation-state" and "city-state."

It is common to refer to the members of the EU as "member states."

So then why not just refer to the whole list as states rather than countries ? IMO it be weird to do so, but at least consistent.

I'm curious what state you're from where it's normal to refer to EU members as "member states" ? USA perhaps ?

"State" refers to "any sovereign polity". The US is weird here in that it pretends it's internal political divisions are sovereigns and refers to them as states, but that doesn't make every other country in the world not a state.

Definition from wikitionary (but nothing is special about this choice of dictionary, you should find a similar definition in any dictionary): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/state#Noun

Of course they know that. How dumb would one have to be to not know France, Italy, Germany are countries? :-)

So then why not refer to them as countries - that's how they would refer to themselves (I'm ex-UK myself). Doesn't make any sense to say "I know they're countries but I'm just gonna call them states instead". The EU context doesn't make any difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union

> The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe.

"State" made perfect sense in context of the post.

lol dude, Google is being sued in like a dozen countries https://qz.com/google-is-in-a-world-of-trouble-from-governme... (and this article is from last year)

And for very good reasons.

The way to avoid lawsuits in civilized countries is to avoid breaking the laws east and west.

Start with the GDPR:

There is no competent lawyer that doesn't understand the basics of GDPR, there are only companies that are testing if they can get away by playing dumb.

Avoiding breaking the law, here, means not allowing users in those countries to use services.

That, or adjusting their business model in those regions so that pervasive surveillance and privacy invasion aren't their core product. Apparently that's so hard that GDPR detractors can't even acknowledge it as a possibility! Honestly, I see it as a red flag that someone is arguing in bad faith.

Google isn’t worried about individuals suing them, they’re worried about governments or entities like the EU fining them

The billions of dollars in fines that EU countries have levied against Google for various complaints in the past decade or so indicate the opposite.

Big companies would love to know what countries that they will never get sued and deal all shady stuff there, does it exist?

"shady stuff" like relying on users to be able to use their browsers cookie settings.

But many are anti US tech regulatory happy.

"Google Bard now open to use..." in the USA only, apparently. At least it is not working north of the border yet.

I'm in South Africa and I'm able to use it. Not connected to a VPN, and I've just checked that my public IP is my static IP address.

They announced that it's now available in 180+ countries in English.

I'm in Canada (apparently like MegaDeKay) and unable to use it.

Either that 180+ country rollout isn't complete, or I guess they have something against Canada('s laws) in particular.

Edit: Amusingly using a VPS provided by google as a proxy is enough to get around this.

Typically, Canada, among other things, requires localization in French to satisfy the laws in Quebec.

Works in India

Not working in Germany.

Works in Georgia(country, not state)

Works in Morocco

Doesn't work in Austria and Slovakia.

Seems to also work in the UK.

UK and US were the only countries with Bard access before today iirc!

Works in Australia

> When Google was a startup and even a decade in they managed to treat everyone the same.

> Today this has went backwards like everything else Google it seems.

Google is not a startup. What's the point of comparing it to when it was 100 employees? Not to mention the regulatory changes that have occurred...

No, that never been true. People in the US have always been prioritised, just like Google Chrome users always been prioritised too.

That's the Google experience, even for extremely minor things. App Actions ? Not available outside the US. Nevermind, now it is, but only en_US can get custom actions recognized.

If only it worked well at least in the US, but from what I can hear, it's just like in the rest of the world: a disappointing, bland, unfinished experience on all of their products.

there are legitimate technical reasons as to why a roll out would happen for one place rather than everywhere at once.

I just think it's remarkable how people can take any piece of good news and find the most negative interpretation of it.

When you get excited, click a link, and get a “we’ve blocked your region and don’t care to explain why” message, it’s tough to have any response but a negative one.

Working in Australia, too

GDPR didn't exist when Google was a startup.

Google probably played a central part in why the GDPR came into existence.

But that's exactly the point. They were able to make things available WW because they did stuff the EU didn't like.

A decade ago GDPR didn't exist.

Legislation has consequences.

It’s not just Europe that’s blocked

GDPR was just an example. I was suggesting that the 2023 regulatory environment looks very dissimilar to the 2013 one. The company is bigger and is a bigger target of lawsuits as well and there's some precedent that European rollouts will be more difficult (like with Italy's ChatGPT ban).

Though the release does say 180 countries and with rollouts like this it tends to be staged so I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in this thread (i.e.. the person from Canada) are just hitting a cache.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com