To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo (themarkup.org) 79
As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual. From a report: The taboo words include "market," "barriers to entry," and "network effects," which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them. "Words matter. Especially in antitrust law," reads one document titled "Five Rules of Thumb for Written Communications." "Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations," reads another. "Assume every document will become public."
The internal documents appear to be part of a self-guided training session for a wide range of the company's more than 100,000 employees, from engineers to salespeople. One document, titled "Global Competition Policy," says it applies not only to interns and employees but also to temps, vendors, and contractors. The documents explain the basics of antitrust law and caution against loose talk that could have implications for government regulators or private lawsuits.
The internal documents appear to be part of a self-guided training session for a wide range of the company's more than 100,000 employees, from engineers to salespeople. One document, titled "Global Competition Policy," says it applies not only to interns and employees but also to temps, vendors, and contractors. The documents explain the basics of antitrust law and caution against loose talk that could have implications for government regulators or private lawsuits.
Re:In Soviet valley... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google makes YOU taboo.
Sorry, the word taboo has been banned. Please restate that as
Google makes YOU culturally restricted in a way which improves your diversity quota assessment.
Please remember it's not
it's
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Don't Be Evil.
Don't let them catch you being Evil.
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Try reading the summary. This isn't cultural anything, it is fear of being declared a MONOPOLY and getting regulated as such.
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Re: In Soviet valley... (Score:1)
Precisely. It's just going to use differend words, to say the exact same thing. Aka the next step in the euphemism threadmill. Long at first. Then condensed. Until it's one bannable word again.
Because newsflash, idiots*: What matters, is *always* the intention. And *never* the exchangeable word itself. Let alone what some SJW terrorist "interprets" it to be.
If I see somebody blink with one eye only, and assume that means he/she wanst to rape me, that's my trigger. And I'm not able to go outside without a le
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Precisely. It's just going to use differend words, to say the exact same thing.
Or just use different channels. Many companies ban discussion of topics like tax planning in email. For big companies, banning discussion of competitive strategy in written form makes sense as well.
Another trick is to set up a dead-letter email address with corporate council so that communications can be marked as privileged.
Lawsuits are a major cost for most American businesses. Employees need to be aware of legal issues and continuously monitoring what they are saying. If in doubt, don't put it in wri
"To mask the term "barriers to entry" (Score:3)
it will be replaced by the much more innocuous "offer he can't accept."
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Well we could go down two roads on this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Notes from internal meeting at Google:
Let's see, we could stop anti-competitive behaviour and spying on customers...
Expensive and time-consuming, not to mention it would reduce our revenue!
Instead, we could make it a lot harder for lawsuits to search for incriminating internal documents by stopping people from using keywords they'd be looking for. Everyone in? Great!
Re:Well we could go down two roads on this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, we could make it a lot harder for lawsuits to search for incriminating internal documents by stopping people from using keywords they'd be looking for. Everyone in? Great!
Except people havent stopped talking about those things in their messages to each other and are using a code instead. Using a code is a lot worse if shit hits the fan, because now its knowingly violated anti-trust laws, and attempted to conceal those anti-trust violations, and every peon in the place that used the code is now implicated as a conspirator, rather than as an unwitting puppet.
Re: Well we could go down two roads on this... (Score:2)
ThatsTheJoke.stoneslab
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Judging by the Insightful 4 score, lots of people didn't get it, so I wouldn't be too hard on him.
Obviously this will be retroactive.. (Score:2)
I assume, given who we're talking about, this won't be hard for them.
Google is a frat, not a business (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see, we could stop anti-competitive behaviour and spying on customers...
Google does much evil, but they also have employees out of control who need to be reined in.
:) I lost most of my favorite coworkers to Google. Once they get in, you rarely see them again. Everyone I know who joined has definitely changed, for the worse as far as everyone around them is concerned.
I know many Googlers. They don't act like employees of a business. They act like entitled frat brothers and sisters. Their offices are decorated like daycares. They pamper their employees with free gourmet food and every crazy fringe benefit you can imagine in the office. And yes, I am jealous.
So picture an exclusive club of spoiled, overfed adults who act like college students with a superiority complex to the rest of the world. They are told daily they are superior to everyone else at every other company and how they should pity us. They are told they are special and elite constantly. They're told their thoughts and opinions matter much more than they really do. It's not a business. It's a club. They even have an us vs them mentality they develop. "Diversity is awesome...you're all diverse and special." "We're paving the way to a new future." "We'll show the rest of them how it's done." It's liberal excess to an extreme degree...and to be clear, I am a liberal engineer in a deep blue city in a deep blue state. Their virtue signaling even sickens me...but their elitism is truly disgusting.
So yeah, those fuckos need to be reined in. They probably say all kinds of stupid things on internal communications. There's a ton of internal infighting. There's a ton of toxic identity politics. Most of us outsiders wonder when they're going to slap the shit out of their employees to get them inline.
When you're making a ton of money, you can let all sorts of shit fly. You can pamper your employees and not care about their productivity. Nothing can hurt you....now regulators are interested and that's a problem money can't easily solve.
So yeah...I think this may be the start of running Google more like a business and less like a frat. Maybe they'll go back to the old days when they actually made great products that excited me. I used to be excited for every Google announcement I read and think they could do no wrong...I deeply admired them...then their releases and service got more and more mediocre. Now they're even getting painful. YouTube Music sucks, why are you making me switch from Google Music, which I like? Why is it so hard to filter content on YouTube Red for my children? Why is gmail so slow? Why do you have a dozen messenger apps with little clear distinction among them? Why are they so slow?
From the outside in, Google looks like it's rotting everywhere but it's core search engine. I knew something would make them change trajectory. This is as good of an event as any, I suppose.
Re: Google is a frat, not a business (Score:2)
As usual, people fall.for the fallacy of assuming there must be a good side.
No. I'm sorry. It's just an asshole clusterfuck. Everyone is evila because everyone is stupid and everyone is stupid because everyone is evil. It's a Fuck Shit Stack [youtu.be]
Or don't use legal terms not knowing what they mea (Score:5, Interesting)
If Google makes their Maps product significantly better, that could be described as a barrier to entry for for competition. That is, it's hard to enter a market where you have to compete with a product that is awesome.
It would be a reasonable statement given the every day meanings of the words "barrier" and "entry"; it's NOT what the term "barrier to entry" means in anti-trust law. Making your product great is not illegal. Using the term "barrier to entry" to describe "make out product so good it's hard for anyone to be as good" is just setting the company up for trouble when nobody did anything wrong.
I have a similar situation in my job. I'm in information security. If some malware gets through our email filter or anything happens that we didn't want to have happen, someone could say the bad guys "breached our defenses". They could say the firewall was breached. They might sens an email about the breach. That all makes perfect sense. There is just ine problem.
Breach is now a legal term defined as an event in which legally-protected data is leaked to unauthorized people. Whwn a company has a breach (data leak), they are legally required to notify authorities and customers right away.
If a security engineer says "breach" when they mean a phishing email got through our filter (but maybe the user didn't fall for it), they've set us up to be in big trouble, though we didn't do anything wrong. We're required to report breaches, we aren't supposed to report every time we get a fishing email.
It probably won't matter until that one time we have an incident, such as phishing email, and then two weeks later we find out about a breach. At that point, some lawyer would holding up the email saying "you knew about the breach on August 1 and didn't report it until August 28â. No, on Aug 1 we knew someone got a phishing email, and wasn't fooled by it. Someone foolishly used the word "breach" to refer to that. Three weeks later, we discovered someone else had received a similar email that did lead to a breach.
Our policy is that we investigate reports, which might uncover incidents. Only if we have sufficient evidence that an incident led to a breach do we start using the word "breach", and management is (legally) responsible for ultimately distinguishing between a breach and an incident that did not lead to a breach. Which means, don't call it a "breach" until the responsible management has determined it is in fact a breach.
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If Google makes their Maps product significantly better, that could be described as a barrier to entry for for competition.
Thankfully, Google is going the opposite direction, where each release of Maps seems to either introduce some gratuitous, poorly-thought-out UX bug (touted as a feature) or remove some essential feature because of (a) lack of screen space on mobile phones, (b) cost-benefit analysis (guess whose cost and benefit they're using) or (c) Sundar doesn't like it.
But seriously, how are you goi
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I think if the time came to split it, it makes more sense to do so 90 degrees from what you mentioned. You want to encourage competition, not set up one monopoly in search and another monopoly in Gmail/Docs.
Its like when they split up Ma Bell into different geographic regions, giving each baby Bell a 100% monopoly in their region, that didn't help anything. Each operating company still had a (legally enforced) monopoly, it didn't increase competition at all. Later, when phone service was de-regulated so
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Courts don't care about fair barriers to entry, they care about unfair barriers to entry. That's what anti-trust laws are all about - unfair barriers to entry.
Note that Monopolies are not illegal in the US, they just have to walk around on their tippie-toes and make absolutely sure they aren't violating anti-trust laws. It's incredibly easy for a monopoly to behave unfairly, even without realizing it, which is why such anti-trust laws exist. In practice there are very few actual monopolies around because of
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If Google makes their Maps product significantly better, that could be described as a barrier to entry for for competition. That is, it's hard to enter a market where you have to compete with a product that is awesome.
ALCOA expanding production of aluminum and lowering its cost and price through economy of scale was used against them in their anti-trust trial, so why not do the same to Google? The laws have not changed; it is illegal to produce a superior product if they decide it is illegal.
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Alcoa ia a weird case - entirely inconsistent with the "rule of reason" used in anti-trust law since around 1910-1920. It might have been decided differently if SCOTUS had taken the case rather than having it heard by Hand alone.
On the hand, it does seem to be consistent with the actual text of the Sherman Act itself. Here we have the courts establishing a reasonableness standard that doesn't appear in the statute itself, to the best of my knowledge. Therefore two conflicting laws - thr statute passed by
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Notes from internal meeting at Google:
Let's see, we could stop anti-competitive behaviour and spying on customers...
Expensive and time-consuming, not to mention it would reduce our revenue!
Instead, we could make it a lot harder for lawsuits to search for incriminating internal documents by stopping people from using keywords they'd be looking for. Everyone in? Great!
You forgot publishing that plan in written communications that would also be captured in legal discovery, eliciting a "What the FUCK were you thinking?!?" response from any lawyer.
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Notes from internal meeting at Google:
Let's see, we could stop anti-competitive behaviour and spying on customers...
Expensive and time-consuming, not to mention it would reduce our revenue!
Instead, we could make it a lot harder for lawsuits to search for incriminating internal documents by stopping people from using keywords they'd be looking for. Everyone in? Great!
You actually need to do both when you're in a position like Google's: Be very careful not to engage in anti-competitive behavior (and it's not always clear what is or is not anti-competitive) and tell employees not to say things that could be interpreted as suggesting anti-competitive behavior. Even stuff like celebratory comments of the form "Woohoo! The new version of product X is so great, it's going to crush the competition!" can be interpreted as planning anti-competitive action.
The thing is that wh
Re: Well we could go down two roads on this... (Score:2)
Eh, sort of true, in that a prosecutor will use it as an additional example of anti-competitive action on top of much more serious anti-competitive behavior, but in no way would a prosecutor even remotely begin to base their case on such comments.
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Eh, sort of true, in that a prosecutor will use it as an additional example of anti-competitive action on top of much more serious anti-competitive behavior, but in no way would a prosecutor even remotely begin to base their case on such comments.
Perhaps. My understanding (IANAL, much less an anti-trust lawyer) is that in many cases whether or not some action is anti-competitive depends as much on the intention as on the action, and that patterns of these sorts of statements can be used to establish anti-competitive intent.
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Just because the words cannot be used... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps spelling and grammar should have been included in that advise (sic).
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Indeed, it almost seems as if this would speak to their management intent!
"Oops, we proved we knew we weren't supposed to do it, now what?"
Don't do it and if you do don't get caught (Score:2)
That's the message here.
Or maybe it really is closer to the "there are FBI agents everywhere, so let's walk somewhere uninhabited, and cover your mouth when you talk so they can't lip read.
Regardless, Google/not-quite-google-spinoff are hardly the only big corps to do this kind of stuff to hide their actionable behaviours
In my last job (Score:2)
if we wanted anyone in management to walk away quickly, all we had to do is mention the word "Union"
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The same thing at my job.
The big problem is I am trying to explain a SQL Query that merged Two or more SQL queries, with the same column count and data structures.
What made it worse is that I told them to get it done faster I needed to Union All, Because I knew all the elements would be unique.
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The same thing at my job.
The big problem is I am trying to explain a SQL Query that merged Two or more SQL queries, with the same column count and data structures.
What made it worse is that I told them to get it done faster I needed to Union All, Because I knew all the elements would be unique.
LOL
Now do a query to show the intersection of SQL and Labor.
Re: In my last job (Score:3)
Maybe using lots of worker threads and a controller in a master-slave configuration?
Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume everything I write in internal corporate communications could, at some day, be seen by everybody. It's not your house, your hardware or your data, so you have no expectation of privacy. The rules are simple:
1. Don't badmouth anyone. This is just good practice in general, everywhere.
2. Don't make off color jokes.
3. Be honest.
4. Don't suggest anything unethical, immoral or illegal.
It's pretty simple, and somewhat obvious.
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Re:Everything (Score:4, Interesting)
5. Consider how it would sound in a court room.
One company I worked for had a policy that only personal matters from HR are marked "Confidential" so that in the event of a lawsuit not to make it easier to sort documents. We did industrial inspections and were concerned even, what to us was an innocuous statement, would be taken out of context. We did our work on floppy which were destroyed, as were our handwritten notes, after the final report was issued to keep working papers out of reach as well.
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Employee, in a casual comm with another employee: "I went to the organic market yesterday and bou$$$ NO CARRIER"
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I would agree.
However...
Some people assume if you disagree with them and explaining why you think they are wrong, they are being badmouth at.
Off Color Jokes are sometime up the listener. Also the base of Humor is the idea of Pain. So a joke that is funny to most hits too close to home for some. For Example. I don't care too much for "The Big Bang Theory" because how they portray people who are interested in Science and Engineering as being different, wimpy, and less desirable (Yes even though they ended u
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It should be common sense, I agree. Despite that where I work we have to take mandatory training in ares like ethics, data retention/confidentiality/managing of personal and/or private information policies etc. every single year.
Some of the content in these courses really make you wonder about the quality of employees that have been through the doors years prior. For example on the ethics course, we learn that it's not OK to expect sexual favors in return for giving promotions...
Re: Everything (Score:3)
Yeah, in the US perhaps.
In the EU, you can embarass yourself in broad daylight in public, and it's still illgal to publish it, unless you agree to it, or a court judges that there is an important need for the public to know. And no, some clause hidden away in some terms and conditions do not even count, unless one can prove that you actually knew them. (We assume a contract is invalid, if you weren't fully in control of yourself. Like when somebody is mentslly disabled, a child, on drugs, including alcohol,
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I assume everything I write in internal corporate communications could, at some day, be seen by everybody. It's not your house, your hardware or your data, so you have no expectation of privacy. The rules are simple:
1. Don't badmouth anyone. This is just good practice in general, everywhere. 2. Don't make off color jokes. 3. Be honest. 4. Don't suggest anything unethical, immoral or illegal.
It's pretty simple, and somewhat obvious.
It's a little trickier when the corporation is big enough to potentially be subject to anti-trust action, because a lot of things that would be perfectly legal for a smaller company become illegal, and because the anti-trust lines are fuzzy.
well, ok (Score:2)
Common (Score:3)
This is common practice in all business communications everywhere. There is a difference between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact, and one must always be careful not to confuse the listener/reader as to whether the statement is one of fact or opinion. The ignorant often interpret statements of opinion as statements of fact and care must be taken to ensure that the difference is plain for even them to discern.
There is a massive sector of society that exists solely for the purpose of interpreting statements of opinion as a statement of fact, and generating statements of opinion in a form designed to be misinterpreted as statements of fact.
The vast majority are ignorant of this fact to their own peril.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine whether the contents of this post contain purely facts, mixed facts and opinion, or opinion only.
"Assume every document will become public." (Score:5, Funny)
Including this one, obviously.
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Dear facilities (Score:2)
Now that you have finished power-washing the parking garage, please remove the barriers to entry. Thank you.
Article is click bait (Score:3)
There's nothing to see here, move along. Yeah, Google's done some anti-trust violations. But compared to the recent T-Mobile/Sprint merger, the consolidation of Grocery store chains or the massive consolidation of apartments (one company owns every building in a 50 mile radius of where I'm at) Google is small potatoes.
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The difference is that not all companies had an outright slogan of "Don't Be Evil" at one point.
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every large company does this. I've worked for several and at every one I go through various trainings that teach me what is and is not permissible in regards to anti-trust, both permissible to do and to say.
Not every large company does this. I worked for IBM and I didn't get any such training until I took an internal class on interviewing candidates. And even then it wasn't like this, it was only about what you legally can or can't ask.
'7334 hAxX0r5' aren't affected by word filters (Score:1)
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What is 7334?
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Is this retroactive? (Score:2)
Wouldn't this sort of policy make all the old messages on topic stand out in an investigation? They're surely going to use keyword searches at some point to get better signal to noise ratio in the investigations.
But "There is no censorship in the USA!" (Score:2)
Yeah, right.
No need to enforce it, if you are so advanced, you can make people *want* what you want.
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Yeah, right.
No need to enforce it, if you are so advanced, you can make people *want* what you want.
This isn't really censorship. It's just trying not to stick your foot in your mouth.
Regular people do this every day. At least those that have jobs.
First we had Political Correctness (Score:1)
now we have Google Correctness.
Lets face it people... Google should just rename itself 'Big Brother' and be done with it.
Taboo (Score:2)
"Ralph...you know those poles on the East parking lot?"
'Yeah, the barriers to enter?'
"Yup, they need repainting"
'OK, I'll get on that tomorrow'
FIRED!
George Orwell's Newspeak (Score:1)
And the disfunctionality increases (Score:2)
Google was never very good at what they did. Search always sucked. Email is generic. Android is pretty much half-baked and does not seem to get there, with fundamental problems simply ignored. They never produced anything else that really worked or that was available long-term. All they did was gobble up desperately needed talented (but inexperienced) people, to the detriment of the whole industry. And now they have become this monster and anybody smart that has not already left (I know a few) will think ab
The result? Less email. (Score:2)
work from home (Score:2)
So with work from home, everything is basically on the record unless you call the person up or something.
We have our fair share of regulatory investigation (Score:2)
So be sure to act ethically at all times.
What? Is that not how that sentence ended?