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Judge rules Google trial documents can be posted by U.S. online

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My favorite doc so far: https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi...

I'll summarize this for people who don't want to read through the PDF, or aren't familiar with the jargon.

It's a discussion between two people, Jerry and Anil. Anil seems to be representing the Chrome team, and Jerry the Ads team and/or sales.

7 months prior, some feature related to Chrome's omnibox (url/search box) was rolled out, leading to reduced searches ("SQV"). Jerry is asking for this feature to be rolled back (undone) to restore lost revenue. Anil is trying to keep the feature by finding other ways to make up the lost revenue.

Anil is opposed to rolling back the feature because it is a user-visible change that was approved by all parties and launched months ago, so it will be frustrating to users to lose the feature and to developers to see their work canned.

Anil accelerates the launch of some other features to improve revenue, but Jerry is not satisfied. After some back and forth he sends the final email laying out his case: the revenue impact is too severe, sales is going to miss quota, quarterly earnings will be below forecast, stock price will decline, employees will lose out on stock-based compensation. This last email is cc'ed widely so I think Jerry was trying to build more pressure on Anil/Chrome team.

edit: do read the pdf though, there's a lot more detail in it.

Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really appreciated it giving me full context before reading the email exchange.

It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this. Honestly, I think it should basically be forbidden for Ads folks to even talk to the Chrome team. This looks like textbook abuse of monopoly power when you use your dominant position in one area (web browsing) to juice your position in another area (ads).

Also, I think it shows the foolishness of any company thinking that "Don't be evil" is a position that can last over time as you grow. I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives ("if we don't make these changes, we miss our sales number, and if we miss our sales numbers, we don't get our bonus"). All big companies eventually revert to their incentive structure once they become big enough. This line of thinking also goes to show why Google has traveled down the enshittification path so strongly over the past 5-10 years. Easy for to me imagine how each little search result change resulted in more revenue and not a significant number of people leaving, until you are left with the situation we have now where the entire first page of any remotely commercial search is just ads, going directly against Google's entire original thesis for their existence in the first place. My guess is the relatively recent change of text from "Ad" to "Sponsored" is because fewer people realize that sponsored means ad.

> I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives

The way you react to incentives determines your moral character. If an action is harmful on its own, it doesn't become any less harmful if you also stand to gain from it.

Companies are amoral and lack human agency, and hence they cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. The responsibility lies with the people making the decisions within the company. And not just the people on the top, but also the people making the day-to-day choices that transform the strategic decisions into reality.

(See also: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)

People continue to parrot the phrase that corporations are typically beholden to their shareholders to maximize profit.

We also know from the prison experiments that people have a really hard time not falling into evil behavior when it's expected.

But I agree: neither of those facts absolve every individual in any organization anywhere from doing the wrong thing. Even if someone else would step in to your spot and do the wrong thing, it's still your responsibility.

The prison experiments are long debunked. It required lying to and manipulating the guards and has never been successfully replicated. They had to be pushed and coerced into evil behavior when they were explicitly being told it was not just expected but required.

Plus, no control group. Not an experiment.

Doesn't matter, we have real world proof of the same thanks to Nazi Germany (they were good for something I guess).

The book Ordinary Men, based on which there's a Netflix documentary too, follows the story of a bunch of police reservists (basically regular men, in their 50s, from Hamburg, who were too old to be conscripted in the army, so were conscripted in the police for "police duties"). They were regular people, with families and stuff, mostly dockworkers so probably leaned left before the rise of Nazis, but were sent to commit massacres in Poland and they did it. Some struggled, especially after the first ones, but later on it just became normal. Those were regular people, not some crazy Nazi fanatics convinced Jews and Poles were subhuman. One of them convinced himself to target children for murder, because it was merciful - you see, they would die on their own without their parents (which were murdered by his colleagues), so giving them a quick death was mercy. He had kids himself too.

Harrowing stuff, but quite decent proof that humans are capable of anything. Nobody is born a monster, but can become one in the wrong circumstances and through bad personal choices.

What in the actual fuck? Are we serious with these implications that Jerry is suffering from the same thought processes that Nazi war criminals used to justify crimes against humanity? It took all of 7 posts and "Jerry from the Ads team" to become "Jerry from the Gestapo."

He's not at the bottom of some slippery slope, a husk of a human leftover from plunging into darkness. He's on the Ads team doing what he's supposed to: making money from Ads. There's a difference between doing something because it's "what you're told" and doing it because it's the right thing for you to be doing. The right thing for Jerry just happens to be a major inconvenience for Anil.

This is an oversimplified apples-to-chickens kind of comparison, but I worked a cybersecurity job where the right thing for me was keeping the firewall up, but Network/IT administration made it clear they found it inconvenient. After leaving, I learned a Network admin DID take down the firewall and that was a bigger inconvenience. Everyone ultimately wants the same end result and pushing your team's priorities is how you contribute; it doesn't make you "bad."

It'd be a bit different if Jerry was out finding children so he could kill them, dismember them and sew their skin into his clothing. But at least he seems considerate enough that he'd do it in that order.

Isn’t pushing and coercing what’s going on here too though?

With the company setting expectations and requirements while people’s job/career hinges on it.

I would consider Jerry as being corporately coerced here and thus more inclined to act immoraly.

The whole “companies must maximize profits at all costs” thing is false, fake, untrue.

It’s easy to prove: if true, it would be illegal for companies to do any philanthropy at all. They do, out of some mix of brand building and PR and whatever, but obviously those same principles can be applied to any other policy that seeks to increase NPV of future profits at the expense of this quarter.

Companies can and do pass up revenue opportunities and that is fine and legal.

Corporations must operate in the interests of their shareholders but business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive, at least in the state of Delaware.

Meaning they can sponsor a little league team but most certainly can't raise wages, lower prices, and cut dividends (Ford v. Dodge). In turn, they can't go so far as to knowingly compromise safety in pursuit of saving a few bucks per unit (Grimshaw v. Ford).

> but most certainly can't raise wages, lower prices, and cut dividends (Ford v. Dodge)

Can you summarize this case? I don’t understand why corporations would be prevented from doing this. Couldn’t you always make the case that lowering prices or increasing wages are in the long term interest of shareholders, with the goal of increasing market share?

I'm not a law talkin' guy or member of any bar cartel.

> In turn, they can't go so far as to knowingly compromise safety in pursuit of saving a few bucks per unit (Grimshaw v. Ford).

Boeing execs that got away with negligence that killed people are laughing all the way to their golden toilets.

As GGC points out, Ford v. Dodge was about anticompetitive practices, not arbitrary increases to wages.

Companies are 100% free to double wages at random. It is possible shareholders will sue (“everything is securities fraud”), but that’s a dispute about whether the action was in the best interests of shareholders in the long term.

It remains 100% false that companies must maximize corporate profits, especially short term.

> it would be illegal for companies to do any philanthropy at all.

Most of philanthropy is free marketing with tax deductible spendings sadly. I.e. smart marketing and creative accounting, so they spend a little to gain much more in return.

Tax deductions are not tax credits. The company is still out of pocket money. Which, if this canard were true, would be illegal.

Philanthropy helps revenue by converting those actions into lower taxes for the companies that do philanthropy.

It is still about profits at the end of the day.

> Philanthropy helps revenue by converting those actions into lower taxes for the companies that do philanthropy.

This makes zero sense.

This is how a capitalist society works, regardless if it makes sense or not.

The argument that companies must focus on profit and expansion to remain competitive is rooted in the principles of free markets and competition. In a capitalist system, businesses operate in an environment where they are constantly vying for customers and market share. If a company fails to prioritize profit and growth, it risks being out-competed by more aggressive and efficient competitors.

even if it’s only 90% true it can still a useful characterization of corporations

also, I think a lot of corporations do philanthropy as advertising, hoping it will be in a positive effect on revenue. So, still doing everything for the bottom line

It has to be debunked and people need to stop using it because whenever its brought up, its never as a thought exercice or as a 90% thing. It's always brought up as the exact truth.

Swedish Aktienbolaget are actually required to maximise their profits, but not necessarily in the immediate term.

More like "not just become evil, but also be actively punished for not to comply". Same with nazis below - if you go against, you risk to go to jail/die. Same with corpo CEOs - if they fail to maximise the profit, they would get fired and replaced. Or if they take risk to not copycat other companies.

I really enjoyed this talk on the history of big-retail lobbying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0dBCooWGo

It has a lot to say about the notion that corporations are beholden to shareholders to maximize profits. Who they're really beholden to are 80s-era corporate raiders who changed corporate culture by enforcing the Shareholder Capitalism model at financial gunpoint.

> it's still your responsibility.

it's not, in the sense of social darwinian competition.

If i stand to lose money, or have to sacrifice something in order to be "moral" when my "competitor" doesn't and thus gain an advantage towards me, i cannot be moral.

That's why my rule is: if it's not illegal, it's moral.

First, that isnt a system of morality.

But moving past that I think you've missed some nuance on morals (or more generally social norms) - they help prevent the degenerate race to the bottom you're referencing. Its upsetting but pragmatic to nullify relative advantage by engaging in shitty behavior, but if you're frequently justifying behavior by citing hypothetical competitors then you're just shitting the place up for everyone by starting that race.

Mortality optimizes across longer time horizons than this individual moment.

If you can steal something and with very high probability not get caught then there’s seemingly a net benefit. However, if you start to steal regularly the odds you get caught are much higher than the most common probability * the number of times you steal. This is true across a wide range of unethical behavior.

Try to remember you lack perfect information and so can’t accurately judge the odds every time. Thus regularly taking low probability risks to your reputation and chances are you’re going to miss judge some of those risks.

Heuristics like this aren’t perfect, but it’s easy to underestimate how valuable a positive reputation is.

That sounds like a dystopian hellscape.

It's the dystopian hellscape that we live in.

Please don't post flamebait to HN.

K, omw to bang your wife

We've banned this account. If the comment were just a one-off, I'd post a warning instead, but you've not been using the site as intended in other places either.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: "If somebody points a gun at you and says,'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all." And while a temptation where one's life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

this is true but it's also worth noting that people who are going to take a moral stance about this kind of thing are not going to last in those positions. this fact does not absolve jerry at all, of course.

Kind of disagree. Employees, whatever their rank (except maybe at the very top) cannot be help responsible for doing their job because of the very simple fact that the purpose of a company is to maximize shareholders values.

It's up to the government (meaning us) to make sure that there are guardrails so this search for profit do not negatively impact society.

And this is exactly what the government is doing with this lawsuit.

A long time ago, when I was doing my mandatory military service, we were told about situations where we were not allowed to follow the orders of our superiors. Even in the military, we were expected to think for ourselves, make our own decisions, and take responsibility for our actions.

Employees are human beings and not property of their employers. As long as you are responsible for your actions outside work, you are also responsible while at work.

I understand your point and yes, personal responsibility is important and in the military, where people are not easily replaceable in the heat of action, especially in times of war, your point is absolutely valid. But what would have happen in that case if Jerry or Anil had quit in protest? Some other dude would have taken their place.

People will act based on ethical standards that are derived from their cultural environment. Since the 70s/80s, the American society (and more generally the entire developed world) has been reorganized around ultra-liberal Chicago style view of the economy and especially the Friedman doctrine [0]. It is impossible (or comes with incredible personal cost) for an individual to go against the cultural grain. In this context, personal responsibility can never be a proper substitution to our collective responsibility as citizens.

The silly notion of the heroic individual fighting against corruption, evil doing or whatnot is dangerous. Everyone of us is responsible for the world we live in, not Jerry in marketing. The law that we indirectly vote for and the one who enforce them on our behalf are the only true and meaningful weapons against our societies decadence.

And these actions against Google and Amazon will show were we stand in that fight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

> But what would have happen in that case if Jerry or Anil had quit in protest? Some other dude would have taken their place.

And those other people would be just as responsible if they fail to refuse.

> It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that "if I don't do it, someone else will."

> Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it, someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."

-- Joseph Weizenbaum

Have you ever voted in an election? That's basically the same situation. Voting is almost certainly waste of time, because a single vote is very unlikely to matter.

You don't make the right choice with the expectation that it will change anything, but because it's the right thing to do. If you are not willing to make the right choice if may cost you something, you have no right to expect that anyone will do it in any situation. If you are not willing to do that, you choose to believe in a society where everyone is a selfish asshole. In a society like that, there is no such thing as our collective responsibility as citizens.

> Have you ever voted in an election?

I have voted in every election I had the opportunity to vote, including union election. And yes I think it matters. But democracy is not just about the procedural token of the election. I am also engaged in my union and in my local town council (and should probably do more).

And there is a wide range of possible actions between being a hero (which is for me the definition of great personal sacrifice for the common good) and a "selfish asshole". I am a realist and don't expect everyone to be a hero. In fact, I expect no one to be hero. I don't want anyone to have to suffer for doing the right thing, that is why I believe in collective action because I don't think personal solution are useful against systematic problems.

But by the tone of your comment, I don't think we are communicating on the same level. So let's agree to disagree and have a very good day.

> It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this.

But it never happened -- the omnibox stayed -- so it doesn't seem like very good evidence to me. It actually shows the opposite -- that the product team built what was best for users in spite of opposition from sales.

I think in this case, the outcome is less important than the process itself.

A simple reason why: if the Ad team reacted early in the approval process, the feature could have been canned at the design level and there would never have been this email exchange. Yet, the user would still be losing potential improvements due to the Ads team talking to the Chrome team.

Except it's way harder to argue on hypotheticals. And honestly, if we have this exchnage happening once, I'd assume the same level of intervention is happening a lot more, but without making waves, without explicit pleas and less drama.

Even at the day to day level, after this exchange happens I'd expect the Chrome team to either be wary of the ad impacts in their future features, or the Ad team to keep an eye on the Chrome roadmap to critically intervene whenever they see something that could even remotely affect them.

As others have pointed out something did happen, but even if it hadn't this exchange still highlights an serious issue. The fundamentals matter more than any single outcome and these tensions haven't gone anywhere. There must be countless other conflicts along these lines and it's unreasonable to expect a for-profit like Google to consistently act against its own short term financial interests.

The omnibox stayed but got nerfed in a rather idiotic way, if https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-o... is to be trusted. So I wouldn't say it "never happened", assuming that this is what they were talking about. But apparently it's back to the correct behavior now (and has been for a while).

> But it never happened

Oh something happened.

Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-se...

tl;dr: Chrome started prioritizing previous searches over visited sites for suggestions in the omnibar.

> prioritizing previous searches over visited sites

To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds like an attempt to keep people making google searches over and over merely to return to whatever search-result they already found in the past and wanted to see again.

It's true that not everything in the browser-history is what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom, done, got it. Then if I want that information again tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed to just returning to the same result?

In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a browser that is utterly focused on the user's best-interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop once you get to that same result... So you probably always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer it prominently to help you avoid wasting time on unnecessary searches."

What if you searched "best canon camera 2023" and clicked the top (shitty probably ai generated) result https://www.bestcanoncamera2023.com? Do you think you would want to go back to that great site when you continued your research the next day?

I could see there being a lot of queries where the search is the preferred thing to repeat.

I feel like that would kill Google.

Yep! It was actually something that made me decrease my use in chrome and eventually switch to safari.

My mental model and my job requires me to use a lot previous sites. I keep my history for a full year for that reason. I might need to go back to something I read 6 months ago. I know I read it. I know it’s out there. And I don’t use bookmarks because I never know if what I read right now might be useful in 3 months. Sure I can google it again, but then have to go through multiple results on google to try to remember the right one. And with the google algo, you never know which new garbage will show up on top

I did notice at some point that chrome would always try to send me back to google even if I knew it was in my history. Safari just shows me the previously visited site above everything.

Those emails confirm my suspicions. This was all about ads.

I switched to Edge because there was no way to disable omnibox suggestions/ad money printer, especially if it autocompleted what I was typing.

chrome://flags/#omnibox-drive-suggestions

The author seems to wonder what it has to do with Google drive to product, not realizing it’s Jerry from Google marketing driving you to go look at ads.

Makes you wonder what schemes the markers are dreaming up for LLM chat dialogue agents to start ‘driving’ us to profitable things.

Ah yes, let's act completely oblivious to the core problem just because this specific case was able to have a solution, yet if we take a look at youtube since 2010 or at how Bard was originally released and kept back till ChatGPT caught on purely due to user pressure (and to this day Bard is terrible, most likely on purpose).

Google has so many cases where millions or even billions for all we know have had their productivity lowered purely because Google decided to do changes and or held back features for the sole reason that it would affect their ads revenue.

Honestly I don't see this conversation going much differently if Chrome was it's own company. Like Apple and Mozilla, Chrome would get paid based on how many queries it sent to Google, then they do a launch that reduces queries and their revenue arm would say "whoa whoa whoa are you sure this benefit is worth this level of revenue hit?"

Apple is definitely not paid by search sent to google, it’s a bulk amount for the whole year. And we can tell that safari just doesn’t prioritize past google searches in the omnibar the same way that chrome does.

Mozilla doesn’t JUST make money from searches. So why would chrome?

In fact, Mozilla has been trying to reduce its dependence on Google for awhile now. I think it’s down to around ~80% of their revenue, IIRC. If Google were to stop, Bing would jump on that in a heartbeat.

80% is still ridiculously dependent and the GP point stands

It's still bizarre to me that Google was ever allowed to purchase DoubleClick (even though DoubleClick was far more evil).

They managed to do it at the right time; back then most people still thought they actually followed "Don't be Evil". Also, unless I am misremembering, the acquisition was completed before the first commercial Android phone was even announced, they were a much smaller company.

The joke within Google at the time was, "We had to spend $3 billion to convince Sergey that image ads weren't evil."

How can chrome be broken off from the rest of google? It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

>It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

The question reveals the problem.

But isn't the alternative just that chrome does? Is that better? Would you have never wanted the giant leaps forward in browsers that Google continually provides?

I don't agree it is continually, I see Chrome as already in the 'extinguish' phase. Chrome was able to make the improvements faster than competitors because - without an bottomless money engine in the form of a search monopoly - they weren't competitors at all. The price we pay for a few years of higher performance may be many more years of reduced innovation from competition.

What giant leaps? WebP images? AMP pages?

Chrome won the browser wars a decade ago, it hasn't done anything since except try to track and monetize that audience.

JavaScript and HTML rendering performance

Safari is faster and uses less memory

Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).

> Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do

As in, Chrome decoupled from Google should have 90% of revenue coming from Google/Alphabet, as Mozilla does?

Bing could bid for it

90% < 100%. It is, at the very least, a start.

The world you are suggesting, where intermediary platforms take all of the revenue out of the information systems, would not be a good one.

This is pretty ironic given that you are talking about browsers taking revenue away google, which is an intermediary platform taking all the ad revenue from various publishers ...

So now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a good product since that's their revenue source too.

That would be a good thing if it drove people away...

After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to me.

I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...

> I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...

I do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?

This doesn't seem to be an issue for Firefox which is in the same boat.

That would be their problem, not whoever orders it to be broken up. And frankly, that should have happened years ago.

Chrome/Blink shouldn’t be broken off into a business, but into a nonprofit org. Lots of companies rely on both which should make funding a non-issue.

What would stop Google from simply forking Chrome again?

Maybe Chromium development could be broken off into a non-profit, but Chrome is just some Google branding on top of the open source Chromium.

If it came to breaking up Alphabet, The courts would include in their orders terms that would prohibit them just picking the pieces back up.....

Yes, exactly. Chrome dominates the browser market via money made monopolizing search ads.

Amazon dominates the webhosting market via money made from monopolizing online commerce?

I dont think this is a form of monopoly, if the only thing the dominant position gives you is money to burn.

however, if google refused to advertise another browser in their search, and instead show chrome's ads in place of say, a firefox ad, then there's huge grounds for monopoly abuse.

actually burning said money to force out competitors is absolutely problematic monopoly seeking. Burning it for other reasons isn’t.

Google search revenue seems to do ok for Mozilla although that's not the best solution.

Senator, we run ads.

> It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

Chrome makes a ton of money.

Google pays Apple and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine in their browser. Google gets that free now from Chrome but they get the revenue from all of those searches. Google would need to pay Chrome for that. Or I'm sure Microsoft would be willing to pay a lot if Google is not.

Google paying all of its employees to work on Chrome, or it pays Chrome to be the default search engine to a new company called Chrome so Chrome can pay its employees. What's the difference?

I think the difference is if Chrome had to stand on its own, it would be even more incentivized to drive traffic to Google for revenue at the expense of user experience.

what if, *gasp*, people paid for chrome directly?

if people paid for Chrome, Google would have to stop collecting data on its users. Google would much rather have that data than some <$20 fee. If Chrome was its own company, Google's money to be the default search engine would be more than they could earn from selling the browser. Free. Always has. Always will be. wait, that's the other data hoover.

Ask the regulators, that's one tool they use against monopolies. Like when they shattered AT&T into over a dozen pieces.

Which created the baby bell monopolies. :s

Sorry but Jerry is definitely the bad guy. The bad guy often does evil shit just for the money. In this case Jerry is trying to hold back human progress. Screw Jerry and everything he stands for and screw his management and the investors for putting him in this position with bullshit incentive structures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

A man's gotta try!

How is this any evidence that Google needs to be broken up? Google, like all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What about this is anti-competitive? Foolishness is not illegal.

Fortunately we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which does make this behavior illegal.

Leveraging your monopoly in one area to advance your position in another area is illegal in the US, even if the company got to their monopoly position in the first area by just having the best product.

This is basically exactly what Microsoft was found guilty of in the late 90s: abusing their monopoly power in operating systems to advance their position in the Internet by making IE the default browser and insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that "The browser must be an integral part of the OS!"

That isn’t what the Sherman antitrust act says.

It says doing it ‘unreasonably’ (or to an ‘unreasonable’ extent) is illegal (regarding trade).

Attempting to monopolize (or actually doing so) is illegal, but leaning on a subsidiary to stop hurting revenue for the overall entity isn’t necessarily that (or illegal!). Monopolies based on actual quality are also generally considered okay (not illegal).

If it was, any company with multiple divisions would be in violation.

We’ll see what the court determines here.

Happy to provide a reference to the law if you want. It’s pretty short.

Edit: actually, FTC has a great write up - which also shows how difficult this case is when you look at other market participants and what Google was actually doing - https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

To clarify, when I said "Fortunately we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which does make this behavior illegal" I was referring to the act and the century plus of case law around the act that solidified what it meant. With laws in the US it's pretty easy to point at any individual law and say "it doesn't actually say that" if you ignore all the jurisprudence that goes along with that law. E.g. The 1st amendment literally only applies to laws the US Congress can make, but centuries of following case law means that it now applies to essentially all governmental bodies in the US.

I think the link you added is great in that it would seem trivial to rewrite that "Example: The Microsoft Case" and apply many of those exact same rationales to what Google has done. I am not saying the case is a total slam dunk, and I think it's fine to argue some of the finer points (e.g. I'm sure there will be a lot of debate along what is described in that "Market Power" section to determine if Google has sufficient market power in search, ads or browsers), but I do strongly push back against the statement I was replying to, "Google, like all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What about this is anti-competitive?" If you can't see how what Google was doing was anti-competitive (whether or not it meets the threshold of deserving of a severe governmental solution), I feel like that's just being willfully obtuse.

Almost every argument on that page for what is actually OK is what Google is doing.

The case law really doesn’t support the current case well, and the linked example doesn’t either.

There are literally hundreds of well known companies that are doing meaningfully worse, with extremely large market monopolies, and are being ignored.

As I’ve said in other threads, the standard hinges on ‘reasonable’ though, with no meaningful case laws or statute that define it in a useful way. So it’s going to hinge on essentially ‘I know it when I see it’.

It serves to show a pattern of behavior to protect a monopoly in ads. This examples show how they leveraged their monopoly of Chrome to protect their ads.

Except that change didn’t get made?

> Leveraging your monopoly in one area to advance your position in another area

Layman here but your phrasing feels way more broad and vague than how I've usually seen this phrased. The FTC's phrasing [1] is "use a monopoly in one market to attempt to monopolize another market." Namely, a market has to exist for both things, and that's what you have to be advancing (for a violation).

What I find fascinating in this case (which might be just my ignorance on the topic; I'd love for someone to explain if so) is the notion of a "market" for a browser. Doesn't a market involve some kind of payment? What would that mean exactly, when browsers are free for everyone to download and use?

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> This is basically exactly what Microsoft was found guilty of in the late 90s: abusing their monopoly power in operating systems to advance their position in the Internet by making IE the default browser and insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that "The browser must be an integral part of the OS!"

Except that ruling was overturned on appeal so this was never actually found to be illegal.

The ruling that ordering the breakup of Microsoft was an appropriate remedy was overturned. The finding that they were violating antitrust law was not.

It's complicated as there were many different claims made against Microsoft in the lawsuit, some were upheld on appeal and some were overturned. But the specific claim I was replying to (that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows violated antitrust law) was one of the ones overturned by the appeals court.

I think the spirit of the antitrust laws was to prevent the stifling of competition using monopoly power.

Microsoft was definitely doing that when they threaten to charge OEMs more if they bundled Netscape Navigator - OEMs couldn’t say “no” to Microsoft due to their desktop OS monopoly; it would be the end of their business.

In Google’s case, I find it hard to see how they are stifling the competition.

Blowing your vast capital to improve your product is not anticompetitive - it’s unfair but it’s not anticompetitive.

Designing your products to advantage your other products, again, it’s unfair but it isn’t anticompetitive IMHO - competition isn’t being stifled; must every company make sure their products benefit their competitors’s as much as their own before they are allowed to release it?

The courts will have to be very careful. Their ruling in this case will set a precedent and in the future other companies can get hit by the same logic they use against Google if they convict.

I don’t like Google’s de facto control of the web and their attempt to kill JPEGXL in favor of their own formats, AVIF and WebP. JPEGXL is the superior format and they should support it but they aren’t obligated to. It makes them a prick but being a prick isn’t illegal. We can still hate their guts though.

How is the described behavior leveraging Google's monopoly status? Making a product shittier to raise revenue is not specific to monopolies and not illegal.

Remove the word monopoly from this and there is nothing wrong with it. It's standard and smart business practice to create synergies among your business units in this way. It's one of the key reasons companies acquire other companies.

While I would agree that Google doing it may be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it. They're just doing what any company would do. It's not their job to look out for the health of the market or what's best for consumers. That's the governments job. It's Google's job to look out for Google and their shareholders.

>it can be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it.

That is more of a US than an EU point of view.

US is more "If you're not a monopoly, feel free to fuck the customer"

EU is more "Consumers have rights, quite being a dick".

Except for the last 20 years where we've had basically zero anti-trust enforcement. Lina Kahn biden's FTC chair is actually taking a crack at it again and has filed several major anti-trust suits against several big tech companies this month.

I'm not familiar with EU law but as a US consumer, I don't think that's fair. They're far from perfect but they try. We have entire agencies that exist to protect consumers in specific areas. The SEC being a famous one. Their entire mission is to protect investors from getting scammed. That's why congress created and funds the SEC. That's why those thousands of people go to work every day. To protect us from getting scammed. Awesome. I'm thankful for it.

The context here is one particular type of fucking over the customer. The ways in which monopolies can abuse their power. Within that one specific type, what you said is probably accurate.

The SEC protects investors, not end customers/users. It's different. The EU has a bunch of consumer rights that apply to everyday people regardless of wealth.

The US has very little of that, aside from the occasional recall. Instead, we have a predatory legal system that thrives on lawsuits instead of regulations.

Yes I forgot, you can't make analogies or even provide examples on the interest, because no two things are ever exactly alike. My apologies.

My point stands, however.

It's not really an analogy though. The US is really behind in consumer rights compared to the EU.

The SEC's existence doesn't change that. It's like saying we have a EPA and a ATF. But those aren't consumer protection agencies either.

Indeed, the GP's description of the situation is backwards. In the US, harming consumers is the surest way to lose an antitrust case. In the EU, they use regulatory powers to protect competitors, even when it harms consumers.

Google's customer service is famously awful.

Only if you don't pay for it. if you pay for it, its average to normal.

(I pay for 1 and I get what I pay for. People respond when I ask for help)

I'd gladly pay ~$100 or so not to be treated like a criminal by Google Ads support, but when I'm already (or was) paying ~$2000/month I'd expect someone to at least hear me out when I suggest their algo might be fucked up. Alas, they won't let me pay for support in the first place.

> it may be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it

It absolutely is. The whole point of these corporations is to serve us with good products and services. That's why society allows them to exist at all. That they get to turn a profit is merely a side effect meant to incentivize them. If whatever it is they're doing is not good for us, it absolutely should be prohibited. We couldn't care less how much money they're making or losing, it's literally not our problem.

"they're not doing anything nefarious" and "what they are doing should be prohibited" are not mutually exclusive.

You aren't disagreeing with me.

They're in anti-trust proceedings. That is the proper way to handle any harm they're doing.

And...as I said...that doesn't mean they are doing anything nefarious. They're conducting business as any other business would, they just happen to be really good at it. If the regulators want to step in, they can. It's the system working as intended.

The strategy to appease by finding additional revenue sources seems flawed. Regardless of these additional revenue sources, you're still leaving money on the table by not rolling back. Ideally you roll back and add the additional revenue sources.

To be clear, they shouldn't roll back. Because it's shitty. But that's the reason - "It's shitty" - not "we can add additional revenue sources elsewhere too." If you validate ads team's concern for revenue but then dont maximize revenue then you should expect them to be dissatisfied.

It makes sense if there is a threshold for wall street expectations in what is a hit vs a miss

Anil did address that in the earliest message (page 5)

Detecting sarcasm online these days is nearly impossible.

nice rescue hah

What a soul destroying job. One way to make the revenue up is just show Google results when someone types in another URL like https://news.ycombinator.com/. Why not? Makes more SQVs. Oops we thought you wanted to search for that URL!

Could it have been what led to this? https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-o...

It sounds like that might be it.

I love this. Sales are being whiny bitches because one part of the company improved a product to make it more customer-friendly and their short-term revenue decreased. Without them even once addressing the fact that improving Chrome as a browser will ultimately increase their market share and search volume.

It's great to see how shitty decisions are made inside big corps.

Increased market share is a plus for another department that may or may not eventually occur.

Major hits to revenue/metrics for ads right now would be clearly documented and immediately material.

Also - I don't recognize Jerry, but I do recognize many of the other names on the threads, and they're VPs or SVPs. So there's no argument of "this is just some random Googlers talking before their bosses got involved". These are the bosses.

Edit: Jerry is also a VP, per LinkedIn.

> sales is going to miss quota

This is why I can’t take sales, as an organization, seriously.

I mean, I get it. I get how and why. Capitalism. Stock prices. Salaries. But there’s such an inhumanity to deciding upon some number and then making decisions based on that number even if they’re dumb.

Decisionmaking reduced to “I’m going miss quota!” I guess this is their own story point hell.

As someone who failed at sales, I have nothing but respect for people in sales, and people who work in account management that put up with client bull shit and bring home the bacon.

And you’ve never winced when releasing a feature to hit a date because you knew the tests weren’t solid?

It’s the same thing, except their risks and rewards are very concrete and easy to model.

Eye opening but not surprising. A company who is building a product who's feature is user-friendly and user-focused but hurts the thing that moves the needle forward for the company is going to be met with heavy resistance. Its like a car company in which the design team makes a design so reliable it'll cut revenue in half due to not selling parts, it can't happen.

Whenever someone askes how "insert site/app" got worse just point them to this, 9 times out of 10 this is probably the reason.

I'm assuming this related to the omnibox auto-searching alternative providers with default keywords or broadcasting that a user can hit tab to search (e.g. typing wikipedia or youtube in omnibox)

Did they roll back the change? We can argue about pressure all we want. enshittification is a thing, regardless of monopoly.

They made google search the default instead of your previous webpage visits.

Thank you for an entirely different reason. Infinite captcha loop and can't use the archive.ph link.

I'm confused by the sentiment of the discussion here. There is so much talk about monopoly. Yes, Chrome has a commanding market lead, but it is not a monopoly in the eyes of US competition law (EU may be different; I am less familiar). It is more like an oligopoly. Mozilla Firefox is a very good alternative; so is Opera; so is Microsoft Edge; so is Apple Safari; so is Brave. Does anyone know if "Jerry's" change to the Omnibox also applied to Chromium? If yes, then this monopoly argument is even weaker. If Google decides to rollback the change, then derivatives of Chromium (Opera, Edge, etc.) can simply re-apply the change into their own fork. I think all this monopoly talk is almost impossible to win any court case because there is real competition and the core is open source.

Does anyone know if there have been any substantial legal victories against any software oligopolies where the software is substantially open source and the closed source version is free? I cannot think of any.

It isn't about the browser. It is about search and ads which are not free or open source. There are alternatives but Google's market share is ~92% which is similar level to ie when Microsoft faced it's anti trust case. They pay off mozzila & apple to be default search. Bing has 7% market share and they are the only "real" competition.

The browser is just one more way google maintains it's core search business. E.g. their recently released topics api

The claim is that Google is using their dominance in browsers to unfairly drive business to their search/ads product. Yes, google has more market dominance in search but that’s not the reason for the lawsuit.

“I don’t want the message to be we are doing this because the ads team needs more revenue” …but then that is exactly why they are doing it. Sales team needs to reach their bonus quota! They can’t be demoralized!

This is a rare glimpse at the enshitification process _actually_ happening.

I can almost read the above in David Attenborough’s voice. Feels like a documentary.

> “I don’t want the message to be we are doing this because the ads team needs more revenue”

That's pure gold. When people start with "I don't want to / I am not ..." and then proceed to say or do exactly that.

- "I don't want to be the asshole here" /proceeds to be an asshole. - "To be perfectly honest" /starts making stuff up

Jerry is really pushing there and the goal is clear: "Long-term: It feels like through some deliberate efforts we can actually use entry points like Chrome to drive query growth... we should explore this aggressively."

None of this is surprising but it's interesting to have it right from the horses' mouths, so to speak.

Translation: You need to do this so we get paid. Same team, right? But don't make us look bad. Spin it so we don't get the blame.

Well, to be "fair", he never said he wanted to not do it...

They just don't want that to be the message that accompanies it.

Yeah, this is the key insight IMO; the implication is that everyone knows that's the real reason, and the only question is whether to be honest or not.

> This is a rare glimpse at the enshitification process _actually_ happening.

Love this. For some reason I thought of those science experiments along the lines of "Our super powerful microscopes and cameras can now record chemical reactions in real time!" This is a case of "Yes, right there! 'If we don't make this shitty change we all miss our bonus' is exactly how enshittification happens!".

That's just such an example of how it works. "Our employees are in high cost of living areas, missing earnings will be demoralizing". If you worked in a large corp for a while, you notice this happening. Everyone is incentivized to hit short term goals.

These days, I work for (some part of) a large corporation. In my anecdotal experience, the people who get upset about missing earnings are managers, not regular employees nor even tech leads. And even that is at the annual level or longer-term; quarterly results are considered quite ephemeral.

Regular employees definitely notice when they don’t get raises or bonuses. Whether they draw the line to quarterly results…

1. "noticing" and "caring" is not the same thing. They notice it like they notice the rain.

2. Our (*) raises are only very partially affected by company results, and probably not by the quarterly ones.

3. Our bonuses are affected by annual results, nor quarterly ones. Also, they're not so large as to corrupt professional-ethical motivation ("if we cripple the product then the company would make money and we'd get a larger bonus"). AFAICT of course, I'm not a mind reader and only know a small part of the thousands and thousands of employees.

4. There are no result targets with some kind of discontinuous effect on bonuses and raises. At least not that employees know about.

Of course, this could be very different at Google.

-----------

(*) - I actually work for a subcontractor so I should probably not even use the first person plural, but let's not complicate the anecdote even further.

At google, a substantial amount of employee comp is in equity so any drop in share price would lower morale.

Usually corporate is more than happy to draw the connection, hah.

This is basically the entire industry now. Even firms that aren't public operate as if they are.

"I don’t want the message to be" is like the corporate version of "I'm not racist, but".

You don't say "I'm not racist, but this cheese tastes really good" just like you don't say "I don't want the message to be that we like hugging puppies". These words in any corporate environment are always a sign that someone knows that what they're doing is ethically wrong or will at the very least piss off customers.

This is a great example of corporate politics.

Author clearly states in the email that the he’s not saying X. But every single word around “I’m not saying X” is clearly saying X.

"Here we observe the marketroid in its natural habitat. Note the ruthless, predatory behavior..."

“…counting their beans, realizing it’s not enough to last through the winter of Q1”

I want to hear Attenborough annotate Jerry's morning today.

It's funny I was just talking about this yesterday. By tying compensation so tightly to stock price, it incentivizes everyone to do what's best for the stock price, not what's best for the customer.

This email is the perfect example of that.

It also incentives short-term thinking and results. Some managers will burn whole departments just to hit a target and then leave after they got their bonus and the company goes down.

Maybe companies that let themselves be controlled by such forces deserve to go down.

The problem is that ~all companies let themselves be controlled by such forces. Given there are so few counter examples it looks like it is a systemic issue and not a choice each board makes independently.

Google's unusual share class structure was supposed to give them a degree of independence from these forces, but it didn't last. They still tie employee comp to share prices, so they still have to care about share prices. Facebook has even stronger centralization of shareholder power, but its pay structure is very similar. Can you think of any example of a public company that is resisting these forces?

Apple comes to mind as a company with some degree of long term vision and strong leadership. They are meticulous about maintaining their brand, and so far have resisted the enshitification.

They also have more cash than they know how to spend. So maybe the pressure to increase revenue this quarter is just lower in general.

If you don’t think that this goes on at Apple, I have a bridge to sell you.

Just food for thought - why do you think that the ipad (with the same processor as the laptop) has not gotten more capable over the years? They can’t figure out how to do it? No one on the ipadOS team has the brains to make it happen, or it just hasn’t occurred to them? Or maybe there has been an internal conversation and they realized that it would drop the sales of Mac machines below a threshold where fixed costs outweigh the mac team’s ability to stay afloat (pure speculation on my part)?

Make no mistake, Apple is no paragon of virtue here. I love their products (though they also frustrate me), but the company is largely the same as Google and Microsoft in ethics.

They also destroy perfectly good computers with their trade-in system, reducing the resale and spare parts market. This would be the plot of one of those environmentalist children's cartoons.

Shareholder independence does not actually liberate you from caring about share price if you want to be a successful monopolist.

Google is not an innovative company and cannot launch anything that people actually want to use. What they do is buy things other people built and scale them up. And in order to do that, you need access to the capital markets so you can borrow money[0] to buy other companies. Those loans are collateralized against the company that took out the loan, and if the company's value goes down, your credit limit goes down.

The only way to actually liberate companies from these forces is not to turn the company from a shareholder oligarchy into a founder dictatorship, but to restrict M&A so that the competitive pressures of "monopolize or die" subside.

[0] You could self-finance M&A but most businesses don't like to do that because it ties up cash flow.

And how do they "go down" if they have monopolized their product area and made it impossible for new competitors to enter the field?

I think tying compensation to stock price makes sense... if you work for a company till retirement. If these stock options are the difference between covering your retirement or working into your seventies, employees would think long-term.

If https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/03/a-tech-firm-tried-it-all-to-... is to be believed, average tenure at Google is just over a year. That turns stock options from a retirement fund into a nice bonus to cover looking for a new job.

why companies are terrible

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

depressing

This is unbelievable. Imagine how different the world would be today if this had gone the other way.

You never know, it’s the law of unintended consequences. Maybe it would’ve caused people to walk away from stocks as an investment. Maybe people would’ve put all their money in real estate instead. Kind of staggering if you think about how much worse the whole housing crisis could be.

Devil's advocate; maybe they would invest more into small businesses instead of housing.

Small businesses are hard. I can’t tell you how many restaurants moved in (and then went out of business within a year) to the plaza next to the university during my degree. The landlords who own that plaza have remained the same for decades. They don’t care if any of the businesses survive. They have tenants lined up around the block, just waiting to pay big rents.

What's the failure rate in small- vs mid- and large-sized companies? Is it really any different?

you would invest in a fund, not individual small companies.

If it had gone the other way it would have been overturned probably pretty quickly. It doesn't make sense for owners of something to not be in control of it.

> It doesn't make sense for owners of something to not be in control of it.

When I say this about my phone, I get told that It was my choice to buy it.

I would really like to have the same set of principles applied consistently to ownership of end product and ownership of the stock.

Currently some people enjoy greater rights for no reason other than privilidge.

i don’t find it at all unbelievable. i think the judgement is pretty spot on:

> A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes…

So you think that companies would be better if the shareholders were not a check on CEO power? Basically that would make all companies like tech companies with dual class shares that give the CEO perpetual absolute power.

The problem with shareholders as the ruling class of an organization is that they are prima facie incapable of having a vision, projecting it, and marshalling the resources to make it a reality. Because they act as a crowd, they can only converge on their common interest, which is profit. When the shareholders have their way, a profitable venture and it's customers are min-maxed for share values until the enterprise is left a pile of rubble

I sometimes wonder if future civilizations will look back on this as a kind of socio-technological inadequacy: "See, this is what people had to deal with before we invented Zlormian Goal Contracts!"

This kinda-relates to other legal theories, such the rule against perpetuities [0], since it's hard to assemble a framework that can survive 50.0001% of the shareholders deciding to loot it.

The closest I can think of actually involves legal-statute and tax law, where a company incorporates for an explicitly-charitable or non-profit purpose and then the government enforces that status indefinitely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

I feel like having a CEO with a grand vision beyond profitability would be good 5% of the time and an ego driven mess / financial disaster 95% of the time.

I would agree if shareholders were stuck owning the stock for a while, but currently average stock ownership duration is measures in weeks or days. How much interest do these people have in the future of the company?

That's the majority of US run companies these days. If it isn't employees with stock grants, the executives themselves have performance bonuses. So doing every long term business killing thing for short term personal profit is status quo.

Aligning employees' interests with the long-term interests of the company is really challenging.

A typical counterexample to compensating in proportion to equity performance is compensating in proportion to revenue or profit performance (i.e. something still related to market performance, but with fewer tangential variabilities).

But I don't think that switcheroo would have resulted in a different outcome, here?

I think, perhaps, the underlying issue is the cultural norm of lionizing revenue to the exclusion of all other corporate principles. In this case, it's not really the Sales person's fault. It's Jerry's manager, or Jerry's managers' manager, etc. – for allowing the feature-blind prioritization of revenue to fester.

Most businesses have one or more metrics that they track that mirrors customer happiness or satisfaction. For example Netflix has total paid subscribers. Amazon has monthly active users (as does reddit and whole bunch of other companies). Reddit also has daily average time on site.

You could easily tie compensation to these metrics. Of course in some cases these too can be gamed, but as long as you find a metric that mirrors customer happiness, then everyone is incentivized to increase customer happiness.

You can increase monthly active numbers by making unsubscribing harder.

You can increase average time on site by just funneling people lowest common denominator garbage all day.

Pretending there is some magic metric here and Google isn’t meeting it is ridiculous. Google is very well liked by the average person!

Those metrics are in fact routinely gamed by well-meaning PMs whose (perceived) compensation is affected by those numbers, with UX-dubious features like unnecessary and disruptive notifications, highly discounted introductory promotional periods that most users churn out of, and so on.

Hence the adage: the most effective way to take a useful metric for measuring progress towards a goal and make it useless, is to make the metric the goal.

Hardly , users are not the customers we are not paying for search , they only have to maintain the image so we don’t sour on the brand , they don’t have to care about our actual experience there are no competitors

The customers are ad buyers and their concerns and revenue dips are being taken seriously here as the public company /esop system is designed to do.

In this instance their customers are the advertisers / ad buyers not chrome users.

what’s the alternative

Damn. Am I reading this correctly? Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get more impressions? All because they decided to tie employee compensation to the whims of quarterly earnings reports. I at least understand why on that last piece, given any attempt at quantitatively estimating long-term value creation at the time of creation is effectively impossible. Still interesting to see the tail so explicitly wagging the dog, though, with a manager all but saying fuck the users, our salespeople need their bonuses.

I'm not claiming I know an answer here, given Amazon's attempt at the opposite fuck employees, do everything possible to please customers hasn't really worked out, either.

If the FTC and US court system have any backbone, I guess hopefully the answer is stop letting single companies get this powerful. The market can only help if there's actually a market.

And I guess quit it with the mandatory return-to-office policies so your employees don't have to live in high cost of living areas and maybe missing a quarter or two's targets and having to take home 600k instead of 800k one year won't be life-destroying.

> Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get more impressions?

As we've all noticed from the shittier Google results the last several years, this has been known. The surprising part is that this communication was not done over the phone or some other secretive non-transcripted way. At least this time. Amateur-hour on Jerry's part.

> The surprising part is that this communication was not done over the phone or some other secretive non-transcripted way.

That only works if the other party is already willing to do what you want. "I'll need that in writing" is the root password for avoiding these kinds of requests.

You mean users click more Ads when they are the only sane option besides the worse "normal search results"?

Anil's on the Chrome team, they don't control search results. I think they are talking about increasing the address bar's preference to search instead of giving you local results (history and bookmarks). They could also be talking about specific queries, e.g. with Chrome's default settings, the address bar can answer some queries like weather or calculator using search without having to press Enter.

> They could also be talking about specific queries, e.g. with Chrome's default settings, the address bar can answer some queries like weather or calculator using search without having to press Enter.

I'm almost certain it's this - that was added in Chrome 69 [0] which was released ~7 months prior which lines up with the email thread.

[0] - https://venturebeat.com/business/chrome-69-arrives-with-reva...

My take is that this all refers to another doc with that ITEM 7 in it. I think these are interface tweaks to Chrome that will drive more search volume, but negatively impact Chrome UX. Chrome team is pushing back, b/c they don’t want their app to suck, but Ruth needs to hit her number.

A great example of this is how they merged the search box into the address bar, to create the "omnibar." Since then, they've aggressively promoted submitting a new Google search for whatever you're typing in, instead of returning results from your local browser bookmarks, history, etc that wouldn't generate more ad impressions.

Omnibar seems to be what this is about. At one point they note that there’s a Reddit thread that thinks their a/b test is a bug.

Which Firestorm had years ago, as the "awesome bar".

If I am reading this document correctly, the changes consists of rolling out new features such as mapping search terms to entities.

While I understand the frustrations people have with Google search, these changes in itself don't seem that bad, although I do agree that pursuing revenue as your sole purpose definitely can lead you astray.

The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries. What feature it was is unclear from the email, since they never discuss it directly, but it was noted that users in the experiment were asking if it was a bug in public. Furthermore, the feature was newly added months prior.

So if I'm following it correctly, the email boils down to "please revert $POPULAR_CHANGE because it makes us less money on search ads, but don't tell people that's why we're doing it!"

(Someone who is a more diligent sleuth than I could probably figure out, but I don't know how to search Reddit for threads in ~April 2019 asking about bugs in Chrome related to features that launched ~October 2018.)

> The critical thing that appears to have happened is that a feature was rolled back because it hurt search queries.

Where are you getting there being a rollback? The earliest emails in the thread say there won't be a rollback, and the newest email asks for that decision to be reconsidered. Nowhere does it say that a rollback actually happened.

(The reddit thread isn't about a rollback, it's about an ablation experiment on a small % of users.)

As I read it, the ablation experiment is the experiment seeing what would happen if they rolled back, rolled out on a small % of users.

Sure, but that's not a rollback. That's just figuring out whether a rollout / which rollout caused a revenue drop. (It's basically as if they'd not done a 100% rollout in the first place, but kept a 1% holdout group. The point isn't to get more revenue from that 1%, it's to be able to measure long-term impact from the original change.)

It's the philosophy behind them. Let's say Google Search improved relevance by showing less low quality sites. However what if those sites also showed a lot of Google Display Ads and thus generated a lot of ad revenue for Google versus other sites. Given this email it's very possible that such a change would get rolled back or discouraged due to the drop on Google revenue from it.

If there had been such a change or a discussion about whether to make such a change, presumably that'd be what the DoJ would have used as evidence instead of this.

The DOJ can't magically pull out a time machine to record conversations that happened but were never written down.

> Jerry here is asking Anil to make search results shittier on purpose so users will have to make more queries so ads get more impressions?

ah but it's fine because he's "super proud of our pure approach here at Google"

and he doesn't want the message to be "Ads team needs revenue" because "that's a very negative message"

jesus, what an asshole

I've never felt about better blocking all ads and switching off every single Google product

I think at this point it's beyond likely that Manifest V3 and WEI and a product of this sort of thinking to stop adblocking

Some high cost of living areas wouldn't be without all the offices!

That's all I needed to see before making up my mind, Google needs to be broken up, or alphabet or whatever they're calling themselves these days. Advertising needs to become a separate company, not managed by anyone with controlling stakes in google and visa versa.

I think advertising needs to be broken into several competing companies. Otherwise it is just spinning off the most profitable part of the company as its own standalone monopoly, and leaving the services users find useful as businesses without revenue streams.

I think advertising needs to be separated from data collection and other assaults on privacy.

Facebook/Meta is a very large advertising company. And it isn’t the only one.

“…and this is why I did not push harder…” This is a full-on circus. Bonuses and stock drop and revenue plus solving a problem for team Sales using team Chrome is just pathetic.

It could be easy to assume this happens across all Google products.

Absolutely. The entirety of Google’s consumer footprint was leveraged to try to make Google Plus a success. And that was just the first example I saw when I joined.

Do tell us about the other examples.

And how did that go?

> "But given this has been live for 7 months and is very usable[sic] visible (see this reddit[link] thread where users in our ablation experiment noticed and called it a bug!)"

The reddit link & comment is just... chef's kiss

I did some sleuthing, and I found a notable amount of complaints about a "bug" around this time (mid March 2019), after Chrome update 73.0.3683.75 went live. Some examples: [1][2][3]

More specifically, starting 14 March, many users noted that the latest Chrome update removed almost everything from the New Tab page (including shortcuts, themes, settings button), leaving a single prominent Google search bar — nothing else!

This looks like it was intended to increase the use of the search bar, thus increasing SQV. By prominently displaying it as the only option when using New Tab whilst removing shortcuts, users accessing frequently used sites could only do so via search.

I'm not sure if this is exactly Ablation Experiment #7 that Anil was resisting to rollback, but it appears seemingly related to the general ablation experiments performed during this time to increase SQV.

Given Jerry eventually suggested a "scrappy tactical" compromise, i.e. "increasing vertical space between the search box/icons/feed on the new tab to make search more prominent", the March "bug" definitely seems to be related to these emails.

It is absolutely crazy to see tangible evidence of the pressure from the Ads(?) Team forcing the Chrome team to ablate/degrade functionality for their users.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/2403795?msgid=24045...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/b0ynkq/missing_2_sh...

[3] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=941631

Additionally, Chrome 69 was released ~7 months before that email [0] - in September 2018. This release added answers to certain queries directly in the Omnibox - and presumably it was that change that impacted ad revenue.

[0] - https://venturebeat.com/business/chrome-69-arrives-with-reva...

> ablation experiment

What is that? "Ablation" as in removal? Do they AB test removing new features just for data? ... and also monitor SM threads for feedback?

Yes ablation as in removal. They then refer to using the 3% experiment to estimate out revenue loss, so it appears they were running an AB test where it was removed for 3% of users so they could understand the metric impact of removal. Part of being a decent PM is monitoring SM for any feature talk.

In AI research ablation experiments are comparative tests, but in one branch some feature is removed. Here the Chrome team is saying that removal of the feature (which the Ads team wanted) was instantly noticed by users.

"I care more about revenue than most people" is a very nice way to phrase "I don't give a rat's ass about the user, I want my money!"

Not really his money if those numbers are not accurate you know

He wants more money to be his. That's the point.

Hope it's not by fraud.

If they are going to redact all the percentage figures by covering them with a box they should at least use a monospace font or something.

Looks like Jerry is a called upon witness the first week of October if my understanding of the docs is correct.

He was already on the stand last week. This doc was part of that, which is how it first came to my attention https://archive.ph/lGLXR

Must be great to get a PhD in CS and get hired by the Search team these days. I hope the high pay is worth it.

> "Then from this menu we can pick the ones that add up to the target result with the lowest negative impact."

I do like how they care about reducing impact to themselves but it is funny that it msut happen because targets must be met.

Would you mind posting the source which has the list of all the documents?

Sorry, this was a doc that came up in Jerry’s testimony before they pulled everything down. I happened to still have the tab open and found it on archive.org

You're a hero we needed

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-google...

If a Google exec is dumb enough to put this diatribe in an email instead of a call, just think what they do with your data / browsing history.

It's hard to read that without thinking about weaving a giant wicker man over the deary winter days.

The don't have searchable/indexed docs, right, only images?

What do they mean by the word ablation throughout the document?

One offtopic comment from me, sorry-- I took one look at the page, it said "pdf" with an open button, and I hit the back button... Am I the only paranoid one??

That's because your browser doesn't have a PDF reader.

The publicly available case docket where trial documents will be posted: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/united-states-...

Thanks Jerry, you’ve managed to finally get me to switch off google search for good! It seemed quite a difficult thing to do in the past, but finally something has clicked that made it feel like the natural thing to do.

Jerry is a real jerk.

This gets to what I was saying earlier in the week regarding visibility in this trial: What is made visible as a three-way conversation between the judge, the defendant, and the plaintiff, and the balance of fairness to both plaintiff and defendant versus public interest in visibility is decided on a case-by-case basis.

Here, it looks like the DOJ pushed and some information was disclosed. That's working as intended.

Your Honor, we object to this motion. These documents must not be released to the public.

On what grounds?

Because the documents really damage our case!

Ah, for Chrome to be broken off as a separate entity and for Microsoft to acquire it would be irony-irony, iron-irony, ironnony?

A company copying the motives of another company, to profit. To then lose the item to the company they copied. A company that once had a similar item, given away for free, to assert market dominance.

I can't wait for Chredge or Edchome or whatever abomination MS cobbles together. Long live Internet Explorer X!!! We're baaaaaaaack!

Embrace (use Chromium in Edge), Extend (acquire Chrome once it's broken up from Alphabet), Extinguish (kill Chrome and Edge then reintroduce Internet Explorer)

The hidden meaning behind E3.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

The Amazon lawsuit is online as well and most of the interesting parts were redacted

Were any other documents other than [1] released?

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1910129AmazoneC...

Lots. You can follow here: https://www.courtlistener.com/alert/docket/new/?pacer_case_i...

(I run CourtListener.)

What's the legal basis for the redaction? I mean, I assume legal proceedings in the US are public by default and only censored/privileged as specific exceptions.

Chrome isn't a not-for-profit charity project. We know it is a free (not paid for by the user) software built by a for-profit company and we can safely assume the intention to monetize it exists. Even so, I'm glad Chrome exists as it has meaningfully accelerated web technologies forward and has helped keep web secure. In return for their investments, if they get to make money off it in clear and transparent ways, I don't have a problem with it.

We act as though we are finding out the ads powered free software services business model today. All of user facing google products – Chrome, Android, Gmail, Youtube, Photos, GSuite etc all exists because they are paid for by ads revenue from ads side of the business. One can make a very strong case that the net benefit far far out weights any harm on the other side.

> if they get to make money off it in clear and transparent ways,

And legal and ethical and benefiting the end-user.

Approx. when will this trial end?

It's literally in the article. Approx. 10 weeks, we're in week 3. 10 - 3 = 7 weeks from now.

Phew it's a real judge. The heading makes it sound like Google has some kind of self-appointed justice system in place!

The cyberpunk Corpo future can wait a bit longer then...

No need to worry, Google Judge[1] would be discontinued after a few years anyway.

[1] some sort of AI arbitrator I guess?

Yes, Google Judge is getting phased out, but it's being replaced by YouTube Judge, which has 93% of the features. And you don't get ads in your subpoenas.

On the other hand, YouTube Judge has a list of pre-approved claimants and will automatically rule in favour of any entity on that list.

But it’s only $65,000 a year to be on that list.

Google Judge sounds like someones attempt to speedrun unethical uses for LLMs.

Or a great SNL skit.

And I'm just receiving word that Google is announcing that have decided to shut down Google Judge in favor YouTube Judge.

Ok, we moved Google judge to Google trial in the title above. Thanks.

Hopefully you can "Brave", "Kagi", and/or "DuckDuckGo" them

Brave is going ad supported, so it'll be under the same pressure as Google. I'm trying Kagi and still reserving judgement.

Ya same but it can't be "as bad", right? I realize the naïvete and irony inherent to that speculation but please entertain and edify me

There's no reason to believe that a competitor who's doing worse would do the right thing more...

Interesting point, but wouldn't Brave be more mindful of damaging their reputation for privacy which is basically (in combination with their VPN service) their entire value prop?

Like Google is not known by anybody for privacy...they don't care, not their pigfarm

Awful lotta work they've done to create a platform independant of Google and Bing (particularly with images), it would be a real shame for them if some silly privacy snafu turned them into LastPass (which had far more in quantity and severe in quality) privacy violations and blunders

Before Google, most of the search engines had flashy banners or popup windows for their adverts. At least that was obvious though...

Going back a bit further, web directories charged more to be at the top. And before that the way you found a business was through Yellow Pages, which was pretty much just ads.

Is that just for the new tab?

I see ads when I open a new tab.

Their defaults can be a tad fucked up straight outta the box

The main reason I use firefox is because I can disable search-as-you-type and search suggestions.You can't disable it in Chrome.

Most of my navigation goes is to sites I have already visited and bookmarked links, I don't need the extra jump to and from a search engine. It's faster and it's better for the planet. Can you imagine how much energy we are wasting on unnecessary searches that were meant to be a simple navgation ? It's a pity it's not the default on firefox. Firefox's "awesome" bar is truly awesome, it doesn't need to rely on a search engine.

Knowing firefox, I fully expect them to deprecate that option in some years from now /s

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