DOJ finally posted that “embarrassing” court doc Google wanted to hide
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
At trial, Roszak told the court that he didn't recall if he ever gave the presentation. He said that the course required that he tell students "things I don’t believe as part of the presentation." He also claimed that the notes were "full of hyperbole and exaggeration" and did not reflect his true beliefs, "because there was no business purpose associated with it."Because of their “marketing/distribution investments,” not any product attributes [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-29/google-se...
> When talking about revenue, we could mostly ignore the demand side of the equation (users and queries) and only focus on supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales. Sure, we had to build the best product, made smart marketing/distribution investments to get our product everywhere, but we could essentially tear the economics textbook in half.
They explicitly mention "we had to build the best product", so I'm not sure where you're getting the "not any product attributes" bit from. (Your linked article is paywalled.)
But to them, "the best product" is the one that maximizes their profits from ads, not the one that does the best job of giving users what they want. Obviously there is overlap between these, but they're not the same thing.
Perhaps, but Google's actual behavior makes it clear that, whether they want to admit it or not, Google's executives are not using the terms that way.
I’ve been using DDG for a few years. I don’t even remember why I started using it. So far the results from DDG have been “good enough” that I’ve never felt the need to switch to Google, even for a single search. If DDG was the default search engine in people’s browsers, I wonder how many would just use it instead of changing to google.
To me this shows how disconnected from reality Google's executives are. They think advertising is just the "supply" side and that they can ignore the "demand" side entirely. In fact, since advertisers are Google's customers, Google is the supply side--they supply the advertising opportunities--and the advertisers are the demand side--they pay for the advertising opportunities that are available. Users are neither supply nor demand to Google, economically speaking: they are a capital resource that Google uses to produce what they supply to their customers.
In other words, the complacent position Google's executives feel themselves to be in is not because they are somehow avoiding supply and demand economics: it is because, due to their first-mover position in search, they have a huge capital resource--all the users who use Google search because it was the first good enough search engine available and force of habit is very strong--which their search competitors do not have. But that resource is not unassailable. Google's search experience has been deteriorating because of ads. But Google's executives don't even see that. They think their search team is doing an awesome job.
No, that still doesn't make them customers. It makes them a capital resource that Google does not have complete control over. Which is something I'm not sure Google's executives fully grasp.
It is true that there can be customer relationships, in the economic sense, even if the value exchanged is not money on either side of the relationship. But in a customer relationship, the value exchange choice is voluntary on both sides. That is not true in the case of Google and its users; Google's value exchange choices are voluntary (it decides how its search service works and what ads to show the user, and what data to harvest from user interactions), but many user choices are not (users can choose whether or not to use Google search and what terms to search for, but they cannot choose what ads they get shown or what data Google harvests from their search activity).
The point of antitrust isn't so much to punish bad people as to make for efficient markets.
Under mainstream economic theory, Google ought to be regulated. That's good for everyone, Google employees and most Google investors included (by numbers and not dollars; most Google investors hold diverse portfolios).
If the industry and economy as a whole grow, at the expense of Google, both my overall investments and my job options improve.
Corporations aren't human beings with moral rights, and laws are there to keep them beneficial and efficient, but to preserve some abstract corporate freedom.
The government rarely understands technology and pays no thought to unintended consequences
Just like the asinine browser choice in the EU made absolutely no difference in the market share between browsers.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo...
I know, people on HN will counter argument that there are tons of other options, but most people I know that use Google, are not aware.
In fact that is where this lawsuit at its core is about.
And it’s not like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook who all tried to enter the smart phone market and failed were some poor underfunded startups.
That doesn't mean that people today are choosing chrome and google search, as they come by default on their smartphones. Most smartphone users don't even know that the browser and search engine can be changed rather easily.
It’s only the default on Android.
Search engine is a different story but people like Google enough they’ll change to Google anyways no matter what the default is.
In the US, only 40% of buyers are buying Android phones. On desktops, Chrome also has a majority market share and 97% of desktops don’t come with Chrome as the default.
This lawsuit is set to determine whether that is case. You can argue for or against that, but arguing against the ability of the people to have a lawsuit to determine that is nonsensical.
Exactly. When the government has done this, it has made things worse, not better. See my reference to Alcoa Aluminum upthread, for example.
> The free market only works with regulation
A free market even with no government regulation still is regulated: it's regulated by the voluntary choices of all the market participants. In a free market, nobody can be forced to trade with anybody else; so if you want to make money, you have to offer something other people want and will voluntarily pay you for.
If you are the only one offering what they need then they have no choice, do they?
Have you figured out the answer to that?
I don't know where you're getting that from. Monopolies are almost always created by governments; indeed, the original meaning of the word "monopoly" was an exclusive privilege granted by the king to sell a particular product. Cartels in free markets don't last because there is a strong incentive for cartel members to defect, since they can increase their profits by doing so; it takes governmental agreements (such as the Middle Eastern oil cartel upheld by the governments of the countries involved) to prevent such defection.
> Why compete when you can merge or buy the startup before they get big enough to bother you?
If the startup is a real competitor, in a free market its owners will be able to realize more upside by competing with you than by being bought by you.
> If you are the only one offering what they need then they have no choice, do they?
In a free market this won't happen: if there is enough demand, it is always in someone's interest to start a competing producer.
> Have you figured out the answer to that?
Historically, the reason the obvious free market things I describe don't always happen is that governments mess with markets, making them not free. So the obvious answer is to not do that.
And then prosecuted them under US antitrust legislation?
Standard Oil Company and the American Tobacco Company were also US Government monopolies?
That sound a little off.
Perhaps your use of "almost always" needs to be dialed back a notch .. or a lot.
"Free market" isn't a particularly well defined concept given the broad range of its interpretation and use, eg: Churchill's "Land is the mother of all monopoly" comment wrt land ownership dragging down a truly 'free' market., etc.
Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly either. There were other oil companies in the business. But Standard Oil was selling oil, at a profit, at lower prices and in greater quantities than any of its competitors. The competitors didn't like that and got the government to break up Standard Oil under antitrust law. Which, as I've said, made things worse for customers.
In other words, if the competition simply doesn't compete very well, or makes bonehead decisions, a company can get a large market share, yes. But "large market share" is not the same as "monopoly".
If you want a better example of government created monopoly, look at ISPs in many areas of the US, where for many years state and local governments gave one company exclusive rights to sell Internet access in particular areas. With the expected result that Internet access sucked as compared to areas where there was competition. Much of that has gone away now, and Internet access as a result is much improved in those areas.
Some goods are more and the mix of regulation, property right, …
There is no rule here.
Government granted monopoly.
> Historically, the reason the obvious free market things I describe don't always happen is that governments mess with markets, making them not free. So the obvious answer is to not do that.
We tried that in the 1800s. Have you read any history?
Really? Governments did nothing to interfere with markets in the 1800s? Have you read any history?
Fun fact: the first tactical bombing from an airplane was on striking mine workers in the USA.
That's the story those who favor antitrust want you to believe, but it's not true. Antitrust actions historically have made markets less efficient, not more. A classic case is the breakup of Alcoa aluminum, whose "offense" was to supply aluminum to its customers at lower prices and larger quantities than any of its competitors. The breakup both raised prices and reduced quantities, making things worse for customers.
> Under mainstream economic theory, Google ought to be regulated.
Even leaving aside the concerns above, Google is not a monopoly in the sense of antitrust law. The real economic problem with Google is that its users are not its customers; users are just a resource to be exploited to maximize profits due to ads. If the government were to do anything to "fix" this, the obvious thing would be to outlaw that business model.
Much the same story with Standard Oil. What young people learn in school from left-leaning economics professors often diverges quite radically from what actually happened.
Conversely, evidence that is far too dry to make a good embarrassing meme could be the conclusive proof the court needs to take action.
She has been slapped down repeatedly by judges.
When I read this, I see a company effectively gloating about establishing such a firm monopoly, in part through "marketing/distribution investments", that they could effectively ignore their customers, and focus instead on entirely exploiting them. The document voluntarily choosing to parallel their level of control over their users as something normally only obtained by illicit industries, like drug dealers is, to me, just one of those 'wow I can't believe you were stupid enough to put this into text' type things.
In your mind, what would be reasonably viable smoking gun for a monopoly pursuing corporation to write down? The Sherman Antitrust Act is described by Wiki [1] as prohibiting "1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market." It goes on to mention that "[a] monopoly achieved solely by merit, is legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not."
Google's users are not customers. Google is exploiting their users precisely because they are not customers, so their only value to Google is as a resource for maximizing their profits due to ads. Which actually makes them worse than, say, cigarette manufacturers, since at least their users were their customers, choosing to purchase a product.
Google needs to keep all members of that eco system content and treat them respectfully, labeled customer or not.
No, it isn't, it's a huge difference. If Google's users were paying customers, Google's incentives for how to treat its users would be very different.
> They are part of the eco system
"Customer" does not mean "part of the eco system". It means something much more specific.
> Google needs to keep all members of that eco system content and treat them respectfully, labeled customer or not.
If you think Google is actually doing this, you're delusional. And to the extent Google's leadership thinks they are doing this, they are delusional as well.
By this logic everyone is a customer of everyone else, since we all buy goods and services part of the payment for which ends up going to all of us. That makes "customer" a useless term. It's much better to stick to the actual economic definition, which is the one I've been using.
> Google operates an eco system that offers value.
Sure, but that doesn't mean everyone who makes use of some of that value is Google's customer. That's a big part of what makes the ad supported business model so dysfunctional.
> A lot of users might have a sort of search or buy addiction, but they are not all addicts that can be / are treated as disposable resources.
Whether or not a particular user is an addict of Google products, as far as Google is concerned, they are a disposable resource. That's a necessary consequence of the ad-supported business model that Google has chosen. And while Google is not going to drop search as a service, Google has certainly discontinued plenty of other services in the past that were providing lots of value to users--but Google didn't care because those services weren't making enough ad revenues. So Google's actual behavior makes clear that, whether or not Google wants to admit it, its users are disposable resources.
Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity and the right to privacy as recognized by the UDHR.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.
https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...
Paying for search won't change the fact that 75% of all web traffic contains Google trackers. This is a fundamental violation of privacy that no one should have to "opt out" of.
Basically, you value Google's business model over human dignity.
How?
Does a village grocer, who knows you like chocolates, and points out a new brand of chocolates violate your dignity?
What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it?
For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively.
Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms.
The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference.
Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming.
Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.
If you use credit cards at both the credit card company definitely can correlate your spending patterns and send you relevant offers
You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work.
If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech???
And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that
This would be concerning.
> ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty
This isn’t happening.
The government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications.
We see it on the state level where companies are afraid to speak out against Desantis because of retaliation.
I define the “other” party as “whichever one you disagree with”. I’m not trying to get into a right vs left argument.
The difference is that the government is not accountable to the majority either between gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc.
For instance, no matter how you feel about abortion, every time a referendum comes up for a vote by the public to restrict it - it’s always defeated even in conservative states yet the legislators go out of their way to work around the people’s will.
The same is true about legalized weed in conservative states or expanding Medicaid.
I can much easier not fall under the influence of Google than the government.
The government is the only force that has a “monopoly on violence”.
A powerful government can do much more harm than an adTech company.
As far as the government having the “public good as a motivator”, are we talking about the same government? The one that goes out of its way not to be answerable to people? The one that funds the “War on Drugs”, “civil forfeiture”, “eminent domain” to take property to give it to another business, etc?
Google has profit and return for shareholders as its mandate. Anything it does towards that end is not a mistake and will not be corrected.
Nor is it a “mistake” that the government seizes people’s property through civil forfeiture without a trial or that the government is actively fighting the will of the majority of the population.
Again, Google doesn’t have the power to do anything but serve ads. The government has the court system, a police department with military weapons, etc.
Sure? This is how investigations work? There is no automatic assumption of guilt, which is what you said.
I’m sceptical of government overreach. But asking what was discussed in a meeting is incredibly standard investigative fare.
> government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications
This is wrong. It’s forcing them inasmuch as my asking what you had for lunch forces] you to wear a wire.
I know I would hate to have been questioned about why I wanted to take a conversation out of my corporate channel when I was trying to have an after work “get together” with a cute coworker over a decade ago (that cute coworker is now my wife).
> I’m sceptical of government overreach. But asking what was discussed in a meeting is incredibly standard investigative fare.
It’s not just what was discussed, the government is assuming any time that you ask a coworker to “call you” that they are going to question you.
I know I would never talk to anyone in the government without my own lawyer - and that would cost money.
Okay? That doesn’t make the line of questioning illegitimate. I, too, dislike being questioned about anything by anyone.
> the government is assuming any time that you ask a coworker to “call you” that they are going to question you
Yes. They will also pull your call records and ask you what was discussed. Again, this is super normal. What, would you like to block investigators from asking what was discussed at meetings?
> I would never talk to anyone in the government without my own lawyer
You’re complaining about the government’s general right to investigate? You know that before these records you would still be questioned, right?
I am, but actually the government is under many more legal constraints to do so than a private party. That’s why the government does all these end runs to buy data off the commercial data streams. Cut off those private data streams and the ability for government to do this gets significantly reduced.
And it’s Google an adtech company. How are they infringing on your rights in a way that you can just not use them?
Yes. US enforcement of the drug trade is waaaay more lax than it has been in the past. The last time I remember reading about federal enforcement against state legal weed enterprises was toward’s the end of Bush’s term which is now 13 years ago. Social attitudes have also drastically shifted. Several places have already started decriminalizing magic mushrooms and weed is legal in most states and it’s more a question of when it will stop being illegal federally.
> Is anyone trying to curtail police power?
Yes. There was the whole defund the police movement, there’s constantly lawsuits about the police, there’s been actual legitimate prosecutions (albeit rare) against police (which is a step up from it never happening ever even if laughably insufficient given the amount of outrage that needed to be generated). Just because you may not be paying attention doesn’t mean stuff doesn’t change.
> How are they infringing on your rights in a way that you can just not use them?
I’d recommend brushing up on economics textbooks and how monopolies disrupt the market. Specifically, there are the two most common ways:
1. Lower prices when a real competitor pops up that runs more efficiently to drive them out of the market, raise prices back up once they’re gone.
Lots of examples like this, not sure about Google itself. Eg look at what Amazon did to kill diapers.com even though that company was disrupting the market in a profitable way (ie Amazon couldn’t actually compete but instead used their pocketbook and shady business tactics to outmaneuver them and force them into selling themselves to Amazon ).
2. Leverage your majority/monopoly position to retain that position. The government’s position with this case is that having a majority position in the market means they’re able to retain that majority regardless of any external competition.
In all cases, Google is harming me by causing hire prices in the market and inefficiencies in the marketplace. Google is also big enough that this gets magnified by quite a bit and seeps into other areas beyond search.
Also, the “you can just not use them” argument is pretty tired and requires willful blindness. That argument has always been trotted out as monopolies always had “competitors”. That doesn’t alter that large businesses can have lots of negative impact just because of their size.
Police stop minorities in most major cities and profile. As far as weed enforcement by the federal government, as long as it’s the law, it can still be reintroduced. While Trump himself didn’t care to enforce it, his first AG very much wanted to but was stymied by a bipartisan unwillingness to fund it. But selective enforcement is still dangerous.
Who do you think a Desantis administration or a Pence administration would go after?
Google sells nothing of value at any meaningful scale - but ads.
You want to see a “million ad tech companies bloom”?
Yes you have complete agency not to use Google and they don’t even have a monopoly on advertising
Also, not sure if you’re aware, but the data that the credit card company gets is really horrible. The category information is often wrong, the business name being billed is often different than the name of the business you’re buying things at, etc. They do have your credit score and probably more accurate financial situation. Google has far better information about you and your behaviors though than the CC company in general.
https://www.checkout.com/blog/level-2-and-level-3-data-in-cr...
I did *not* "opt in" to allowing the shop owner to follow me everywhere I go.
In the online world, Google follows you almost everywhere --- without any "opt in".
See the philosophical difference?
You have an extremely wealthy corporation incentivized to collect massive amounts of very personal data about every part of you and you desires and psychology, incentivized and well-able to collect it in hidden and powerful ways across the web and build deep learning models of your psychology and desires, and store them in a place where it's possible for nefarious actors and governments to either legally or illegally access and use that information for unknown purposes. If you object to this characterization, fine, start with the objection, but it's an obvious characterization which I've presented, and it's obvious that this is what people are concerned about! Starting the conversation with "it's no different, philosophically, from your grocer knowing your love of chocolate" is such a non-starter only because it seems so disingenuous, like, how could you not see how your interlocutor sees it differently? It just presents so clean and abstract a little simplification, though, so it's handy for winning point in a debate setting.
I don't agree with GP but I want to defend the analogy, which I found perfectly fair. Analogies help us understand the world and uncover internal contradictions in our thinking.
I thought vlovich123's sibling comment did a great job responding the analogy on its merits (making some of the same points you did).
Search ads hardly need personalization profile, as the query itself already has a incredibly strong signal for what would be good to sell you, and other query metadata (location, time of day) boosts that a lot.
This case against Google is addressing the symptom rather then the real problem/incentive. Make invasive personalized advertising "opt in" only and the marketplace will address the search issue.
The personalization profile based on searches and other stuff is used for their display network (ads across the web), but that entire network is way less valuable than Google Search alone. [0]
lmfao. HN never gets old.
Despite their desperate attempt to scarequote and chop up excerpts from a direct quote, they fail to demonstrate "Google exec said users get hooked on search engine like “cigarettes or drugs.”"
He didn't say that from what I'm seeing; the quotes they use don't say that, and anyone who can read can clearly see the evidence they provide doesn't support the claim. The unquoted part ("with /economics/ that[...]") even indicate it's not a behavioral observation.
That subheadline really detracts from the point of the article.
But somehow I don't disagree with the comment, it's extremely addictive to believe you could get the answer to any question instantly, even if in reality you'll often get a lot of garbage if your question happens to be in an area where a lot of people have something to sell.