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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really agree with that - I've seen plenty of things that have been taken out of context, and portrayed actions in a really false light. It's really not hard to take some off the cuff email or Slack remark and present it as something like official company policy.

More importantly, though, I think anything a company says internally should be 100% irrelevant in an antitrust case. It's like the famous advice parents should give their kids when it comes to relationships: "Just ignore everything a potential partner says, and only focus on what they do."

I mean, it's not like corporations need to have any sort of "mens rea" to be found a monopoly abuser. IMO all that should be evaluated are the actual actions a corporation took to stifle competition. I don't really see why internal communications are relevant at all in these trials.

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don't agree at all, internal communications are absolutely relevant

Care to explain why? When evaluating whether a company has abused its monopoly, why isn't it enough to simply look at its actions?

To be clear, I don't feel this way to give companies a break. I feel this way because whatever employees were thinking behind the scenes shouldn't matter. If a company locks up the defaults on pretty much all browsers, why isn't that fact alone enough to come to a conclusion?

I imagine it has to do with intent and willfulness.

Not sure if that’s relevant or not in a monopoly case though.

On some level, I don't think a company has actions. Everything a company does are effects of what their employees do. Then it boils down to, is the action of an employee sanctioned by management? This you can only tell by looking at the internal communication.

Everything a human does are the effects of what its cells do. This logic doesn’t hold, we treat the entity as an entity and acknowledged that it’s intentions are often beyond the scope of its individual parts. Just as the grouping of cells have goals independent of any one, so does a group of men.

Yes it is a legal entity, but it does not have own motives. It is just a vehicle for human activities. You can't call a company to the witness stand, and you can't put it in jail. Even if you could, it would not suffer.

search on "Corporate death penalty"

But your response and the other responses here about "intent" highlight my exact point:

1. No individuals were charged with anything in this situation. When determining the remedy in an antitrust case, it's always about changes to the company structure or behavior: breaking them up, restricting areas where they can do business, etc. I think whether something was "sanctioned by management" is totally irrelevant here. Also, the types of decisions we're talking about here (acquiring companies, paying off other companies to be the default search engine, etc.) are usually so big they are always done with management approval. What, "Sorry, Bob in accounting accidentally paid Apple a billion dollars to be the default search engine on iOS"?

2. "Intent" here should be totally irrelevant. At the corporate level of behavior, "well, I didn't mean to shoot them" is a nonsensical response. Whether Google's "intent" was to crush the competition or to just vacuum up all the revenue for themselves, who cares? The outcome is the same, and what should be judged is whether the actions Google took as a company were anticompetitive.

since Discovery is used in almost all civil and criminal actions:

You're proposing abolishing it but only in antitrust cases?

The materials found during discovery are not always relevant. You can discover all of them, but then some of them shouldn't be presented to the court or jury.

Intent(like possession) is 9/10ths of the law.

I believe the original was “possession is 9 points of the law” and over time it has been bastardized into “nine tenths”.

also, "intent" is never 9 points of the law, let alone 9/10.

it's one of the points.

I'm guessing some actions that could be interpreted as abusive, could to some extent have been random. But internal communications tell you if they were random or planned out.

I think that maybe goes for going after the decision makers.

As for deciding if the company needs regulation or being broken up because it's operating as a monopoly, there I would agree with you. It wouldn't really matter if it just happened as an accident of the market, or as a planned outcome, if it creates a bad market dynamic, it should be corrected.

> I've seen plenty of things that have been taken out of context, and portrayed actions in a really false light

And in those situations, the answer to "What context, exactly, is missing?" would be exculpatory. If it is out of context, the context would demonstrate that. If it's as damning as it seems, then "you're taking that out of context" will be demonstrated to be BS when context is provided.

And LA didn’t burn after the Rodney King verdict?

A lot of people don’t bother before deciding, despite the procedures.

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