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.
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 do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?
As in, Chrome decoupled from Google should have 90% of revenue coming from Google/Alphabet, as Mozilla does?
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.
The question reveals the problem.
Chrome won the browser wars a decade ago, it hasn't done anything since except try to track and monetize that audience.
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.
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.
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!"
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...
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.
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’.
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...
Except that ruling was overturned on appeal so this was never actually found to be illegal.
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.
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.
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.
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."
I could see there being a lot of queries where the search is the preferred thing to repeat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
(I pay for 1 and I get what I pay for. People respond when I ask for help)
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.
My point stands, however.
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.
Or you're the worst apologizer in the world, jesus christ, go read a tutorial or something.
And no your point doesn't stand. The defensiveness about it being exactly alike would matter if it was an analogy, but you did not make an analogy. Non-analogies do have to match, and that is not an unreasonable standard.
How about you quit being such a pedant. An example is not supposed to be exactly the same in every way. It doesn't even need to be mostly the same. It can be only kinda sorta maybe related and that's ok. It's just an example.
Somehow analogies an examples came to mean perfect clones. That's not what they are.
You don't need to apologize, but a fake apology serves no purpose except to annoy people.
A fake apology that claims "genuine remorse" is extra annoying.
> How about you quit being such a pedant. An example is not supposed to be exactly the same in every way. It doesn't even need to be mostly the same. It can be only kinda sorta maybe related and that's ok. It's just an example.
Examples do need to be the same. That's the point of examples, they show what something is.
You can have "an example of something related", but that's not evidence of whatever it's related to. It's ancillary information.
This isn't pedantry, this is how you explain things and argue points. I can't fix an incorrect example by steelmanning your argument, the way I could ignore an actual issue of pedantry.
On the other side, an analogy doesn't have to be related at all, but it takes significantly more to set up. A connects to B the same way that X connects to Y. It looks very different from an example.
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.
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 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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
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 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.
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 is still about profits at the end of the day.
This makes zero sense.
And when you use words incorrectly, you don't make any sense.
If the tax rate is 30% and I have 100 dollars in profit, I will have 70 dollars left in the bank. Instead, if I donate 10 dollars and write it off, I will still have to pay 27 dollars in taxes, leaving me with only 63 dollars.
So, it's not just about words. Your comment is fundamentally wrong.
It would still be lower with the philanthropy and tax deductions, rather than not doing the philanthropy and paying more taxes. You can never get a bigger tax reduction than the amount you're putting in. The only way that would be possible is if tax rates exceeded 100%.
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).
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?
Boeing execs that got away with negligence that killed people are laughing all the way to their golden toilets.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
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.
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.
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.
Major hits to revenue/metrics for ads right now would be clearly documented and immediately material.
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.
It’s the same thing, except their risks and rewards are very concrete and easy to model.
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.
The browser is just one more way google maintains it's core search business. E.g. their recently released topics api
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.