Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fowlerpower 3216 days ago
The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.

It is a little unfair to think this problem exists only within Google. Time and time again we are reminded why corporations will evolve to become as greedy and as protective of their turf expansive of their power and monopolistic as they can get, even if good people are running them. It is the system itself that does this, corporations evolve to survive and to thrive. That in of itself isn't a bad thing but you need checks and balances. Things like the Supreme Court saying that Corporations are people or all the money pouring into our political process those are things that have to change.

Even the best of them will eventually become the worst of them. Google is now evil for sure, no doubt about that, but there have been and there will be many others.

13 comments

Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it.

If every significant avenue of communication used by people is controlled and censored by a group, no matter who it is, there is no option for progress. Any attempt to change social values will inevitably run up against a wall of not being able to actually express proof that societies values have changed. Imagine if tomorrow every human being on Earth woke up realizing nudity is a strange thing to get worked up about. What would happen? The idea would die, isolated, because even if people said they thought nudity was fine, they could never prove it as the communications networks they use would censor out anything containing nudity, stultifying culture and freezing it to whatever was acceptable in the early 2000s.

> and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it.

Because they're pushing the progressive agenda, so who in the media, government, or academia is going to stand in their way? As far as those parties are concerned, Google is doing what corporations "should" do.

> Because they're pushing the progressive agenda

I would say Shmidt's agenda is more neo-liberal than progressive. Not that I endorse it, but corporations pushing an agenda is not new[1] and not limited to the left[2][3], so not even conservative media will stand in their way either since that has been happening for a long time on the right.

1. http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/12/12338/shilling-profit-ca...

2. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hobby-lobby-wins-contraceptiv...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_same-sex_marriage_...

Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A aren't out sending hundreds of millions financing think tanks and lobbyists in Washington, they are just trying to run their own business with their own agenda. And the scale of the companies are orders of magnitude smaller than Google, both are medium sized family owned businesses.
> Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A aren't out sending hundreds of millions financing think tanks and lobbyists in Washington

Why would they? Washington is already controlled by people who share their ideology.

It is ok not to like Hobby Lobby or their owners, but explain how you think that is relevant to "corporations pushing an agenda."
Chick-fil-A is much smaller than Google, but they were funding think tanks and lobbyists, until boycotts convinced them to stop.
Where are these praise Google for its liberalism stories? Prior to Trumpism and the breakdown of modern politics, the only time I really heard people talking about how wonderful it was that Google was liberal was the occasional fluff piece about their solar programs.

So where are the stories of senators saying, "those guys at Google, they're what we should be striving for." As opposed to senators raking them over the coals (rightly) for tax avoidance.

What's so progressive about censorship and why are you glorifying it?
I wouldn't ask what's so progressive about censorship, but why have progressives seemingly embraced it? or at least distanced themselves from a more firm defense of free speech.
Which progressives have embraced censorship?
https://qz.com/1053957/charlottesville-neo-nazis-and-the-cas...

I think this article is a good encapsulation of the progressive ambivalence on free speech, which has provided a rationale for violence against speakers like Charles Murray (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middleb...), the violent protests that have followed Milo Yiannopoulos, and "safe spaces" on college campuses.

parent poster is likely referring to the right to sit in your office all day spouting pseduoscientific essays on why 20% of your coworkers probably should not be working in the job they have.
> Because they're pushing the progressive agenda, so who in the media, government, or academia is going to stand in their way?

Well, the media largely only cares for agendas that fit their advertiser's preferences. Their advertiser's preferences are dictated by what they think will help their business... they're not particularly concerned with the nature of any particular agenda, only whether an agenda benefits them.

The government is the largely similar, but rather than advertisers it's political parties balancing appeal to their donors, lobbyists and other powers. To a minor degree also to their base, but hand-waving and obscurantism tends to limit this need.

Academia increasingly does seem pretty screwed up (STEM isn't free of issues, but the really nutty stuff is mostly in the 'humanities'). I suspect firing Damore will probably sate their blood-lust for a while.

> Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture.

Which book, and could you perhaps share some excerpts, or a link with more information?

As to your first paragraph, many companies and founders would say the the same thing, no? "We want to change the world by doing X (through their business)". Also, what other metric for success is there in the current culture of the USA other than business success? Not that I'm saying that's bad or good...
I think you're correct, but the scary thing in this case is that Google/Alphabet might actually be able to do it, for better and worse.
>Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue

Quote the relevant parts so people can see how hyperbolic you're being.

> Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it.

Google proved that all you need is a colorful logo and a stupid catch phrase ("Don't be evil") to get people to treat you as an infallible, altruistic entity - regardless of the fact that your actions tell a completely different story.

Like Apple, Google has become a religion for their fans. As with all religions, inconvenient facts are dutifully ignored by members of the Holy Order of Goog. I find the worship of corporations even more difficult to grasp than Scientology.

> Google proved that all you need is a colorful logo and a stupid catch phrase ("Don't be evil") to get people to treat you as an infallible, altruistic entity - regardless of the fact that your actions tell a completely different story.

I don't think the logo or catch-phrase have much to do with it. Google's search engine was orders of magnitude better than anything else when it came out (that's how they won the market) and they've used their dominance of the web to improve their search to the point where the search box can read your mind. That is why people treat them as good -- because "morally good" and "usefully good" are difficult to separate.

You see Apple users (and maybe Linux users?) as religious zealots and assume they must have been tricked by a pretty logo or some CS hazing ritual. What's actually going on is that they're reacting to one very positive experience (maybe along some dimension that you don't care about) and following the human inclination to extrapolate that experience to the whole product/company.

I think you're mostly right. After all, the most hated companies tend to be ones with poor customer service, not ones who do the most harm.

I do think Google cultivating an image of being just a quirky group of nerds (rather than a profitable and influential company) contributed to them seeming benign, and their logo and slogan are part of that.

> the most hated companies tend to be ones with poor customer service

At Google, they avoid this by providing no customer service at all.

Which is why freedom of assembly is lumped in with freedom of speech. As long as two people can congregate together, they can communicate with one another.
Except they're not. And these platforms (Google, Facebook, CloudFlare, Twitter, Youtube, Berkeley, Patreon, Namecheap, etc) are all daily indicating, to varying degrees, that they are willing to step in as a third-party between two consenting individuals "congregating" and "communicating" in order to censor them.

Such individuals, if they choose to say things that the platform doesn't like at an institutional level, then they don't have that right anymore because they get removed/de-listed,banned/de-platformed. Generally, I'm a free-market person, and I'd advocate that entities should have the right to deal with their own platform how they see fit. But in this case, they're collaborating with traditional media, learning institutions and social-agenda groups in order to create a giant echo chamber. We're watching that play out right now in that certain non-left and non-pc speech behavior is condemned and those that wish to express them are de-platformed.

We may not always agree with those points, or find them palatable, but up until now I think we've been navigating a middle-line where general public opinion ebbed and flowed between the two sides. It's tipped incredibly to one side on numerous issues, and I'm afraid that a specific set of viewpoints are now pervading our society. Once it gets to a point, it's only a matter of time before entire generations are raised believing only the accepted-viewpoint. It may be a bad example, but you see it happening already in public-schools where teachers are actively pushing social-agenda issues onto their kids. It happened with anti-Trump attitudes, with transgender-activism, gender-gaps, race-activism, etc. One side is accepted, and debate is silenced, and teachers are forced or encouraged to teach those things to impressionable young minds instead of encouraging free debate.

Further, if you ask most conservatives, they actively disagree with a lot of those things even if it's from the perspective of government-meddling. Conservatives are generally half the population, so something is definitely skewed and going wrong.

> The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.

This is the price for being a public C-corp. There are very few people in history who can withstand the short term mob mentality of shareholders - in my mind only Jobs, Bezos, and Musk could do it... and survive. (imo Not even Bill Gates or Edison could do it) Maybe for other companies this can be mitigated by becoming a B-corp instead i.e public benefit company

Larry and Sergey own super-voting shares and can outvote all other shareholders combined.
Sure, but is Google's motto still "don't be evil"?

They may be able to potentially wield a big stick, but what's its use when they'll never use it and push back? they've been strong armed by Wall St to the point where they've kowtow enough to drastically change Google in not so great ways. In their defense, very few people can do better

Why do you think Wall Street strong armed them into dropping the motto? Isn't it more likely that the people in charge simply changed their minds about the best way to run the company? And, given the lack of formal control, what mechanism did Wall Street use?
Are most leaders of publicly traded companies immune from wall st analyst quarterly estimates and projections? Do they not greatly affect the company's share price?
The leaders of most public companies are indeed influenced by analysts and investors. The reason is because the leaders of most publicly traded companies can be fired by the board, and the board's perception of leader performance is influenced by analyst opinions and the opinions of large and/or influential shareholders. In Google's case, Larry and Sergey hire and fire the board, not the other way around. There is a meaningful difference between the corporate governance dynamics at Google and most other public companies.
The thing is, these sort of situations (creating dependence) are very hard to pick apart and point out who is at fault.

Say an organization 'A' funds another organization 'B' (maybe non-profit, maybe not), and over time 'B' becomes very dependent on the donations they are getting from 'A'. Then say they start to have a conflict of interest, and 'A' drops funding(which probably kills 'B').

Who's the bad guy here? How should've 'B' known there might be a conflict of interest in the future if not immediately?

It's a simple issue, bar entities that should not have conflicts of interest from accepting gifts/investment/etc that could create a conflict of interest.

It is appalling how US senators are allowed to receive gifts or be compensated in creative ways by companies.

But we're talking about a think tank, right? It's a private group of people that write about their opinions. Why shouldn't they have conflicts of interest?
Or you can limit the percentage of funds you can get from certain types of entities in order to reduce or prevent dependence. My current employer (a research no profit) has this limitation in its basic rules
Afaik, us senators can't. Their campaigns can.
A second question then: how do you define a conflict of interest?
Those prohibitions are in place. I think you are confused...
But others didn't start with "Do No Evil" motto (transformed now into "Do the Right Thing").
Google's still is "Don't be evil", Alphabet's is "Do the Right Thing"
> Alphabet's is "Do the Right Thing"

For the shareholders, of course. Does anyone else even matter?

Isn't this, like, cynicism completely decoupled from reality? Google invests a lot of money and time in a myriad of projects with altruistic motivation. Google summer of code, $100 Million per year for non-profits, OSS releases such as tensorflow or Chrome, google.org and on and on.

Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anything right.

Many of their regular products also straddle the border to altruism. Google Scholar doesn't seem to bring in much money, yet it's one of the most important tools for research. Electric, and self-drivings cars seem to be obvious wins for both the shareholder and humanity etc. etc.

They've also created the model for the modern workplace: rooted first and foremost in trusting people to do the right thing, and letting follow their interest to a degree previously only seen at Bell Labs and similar institutions of a lost era. And where Bell Labs was possible because Bell was raking an incredible amount of money, Google has turned the causality around: their free-wheeling embrace of creativity is seem the world 'round as a reason for their success.

> Google summer of code

Trains and evaluates young engineers either for them to hire or to work in their ecosystem

> $100 Million per year for non-profits

PR, taxes, and as the article describes, leverage.

> OSS releases

Giving things out for free helps pull everyone into your ecosystem.

> Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anything right.

This is true. The only way for a company to be truly altruistic in a capitalist system is to be irrational: donate anonymously to organizations that oppose it, buy commercial time and then air white noise to block other groups from political ads. No company is going to do that (or if they do they won't last long).

There's no real solution that involves "tsk"ing at Google or trying to shame them into "doing the right thing". That has to come from outside.

At worst this looks like enlightened self-interest. You don't have to be a fan-boi to see there's there's a difference between Google and companies like Massey Energy (29 dead after flagrant safety violations [0]) and Enron (massive accounting fraud [1]). Making it a binary choice between altruistic/not erases any differences in corporate behavior when in fact there are practical distinctions with direct effects on the lives of employees, customers, and society at large.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

And then you have Bill Gates going: this year, I'm going to eradicate disease X from the planet for all humanity because I have the money.

That's altruism.

Research into self driving cars, on a closed platform, is a PR move.

> Research into self driving cars, on a closed platform, is a PR move.

Google has the largest contribution in advancing the state of the art in AI. That benefits humanity in many ways, SD cars being just one of them. They are also working on healthcare, robotics and reasoning agents. All these things will be a boon for humanity. Discoveries are discussed in the open.

They're not going to invest in things that might disintermedate themselves.
Google's motto was never "do no evil". Previously, it was "don't be evil".
> Google's motto was never "do no evil". Previously, it was "don't be evil"

They should probably use a motto that derives from Dungeons and Dragons' lawful/neutral/chaotic good/neutral/evil alignment system, just so we can be sure.

Google would be lawful evil whereas Uber would be chaotic evil.

What's "evil" here?
In D&D's alignment system "evil" is close to "selfish".

A lawful-good company would try to promote better security for all users. A chaotic-good company would tank the search-rankings of anyone who didn't implement better security. A lawful-evil company would track your every move and offer an opt-out system. A chaotic-evil company would have the opt-out form do nothing.

"Don't be chaotic".
That's a common misconception. It was really "do know evil".
At first I chuckled. Then I recalled few stories.
It really should say: "Lay with the dogs, wake up with the fleas"
To be fair, it doesn't say for whom it is the right thing.
Soon to be "Just Do It" with "It" for unspecified moralities.
This is Schmidt acting thru one of his private foundations. It is his money. This isn't Google.
Didn't the article say Google, not Schmidt, gave $21 million to the think tank?
I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to fowlerpower's comment:

> The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.

And as for the article, it says:

> The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999.

So yes, Google did contribute. But so did Schmidt and his family foundation. I think this is mostly on Schmidt personally rather than Google as a corporation.

I think they are indistinguishable here. Google and Schmidt both gave money, Schmidt is the executive chairman of google, so there's no distance between them.
It's pretty disingenuous to consider Schmidt's personal conduct and wealth as separate of Google. As Alphabet's board chairman, he's the third in charge of the company, and is usually the one conveying Google's political position to the leadership of various countries. And a significant portion of his wealth is either cash from Google or stock that's still invested in Google.

The primary difference in it being his personal action, is that there's a lot less regulation governing his use of it.

Google was never good. They only ever did what they thought fit their strategy at the time, to allow them to grow and make more money.
Google was fantastic and contributed greatly to breaking the iron grip Microsoft had on the industry. They also completely changed the way we use the Internet, pushed network and security technologies forward and to the end user, and made sure iPhone/iOS have a worthy competition in the smartphone market.

It is very sad that they went down the censorship path. Especially since the open web made Google Search a viable business in the first place.

Anyone remember when they bought DoubleClick, one of the most reviled companies on the net?
One of their competitors?
Are you referring to http2? The binary standard they pushed to help them crawl better and make things less debugable for the rest of the network community that's mostly small entry developers?
> Google was fantastic and contributed greatly to breaking the iron grip Microsoft had on the industry.

Now Google has the iron grip instead, and over the entire internet.

Tell me again how this was an improvement.

Whatever may be happening now, this is super-revisionist history.

Google fought a large number of very lonely fights in the early dates, all in the name of consumers, the industry, and doing the right thing. It took a very large number of lumps and made a lot of enemies for doing so, but did it anyway.

I was there, in the DC office, working next to the policy director (I started the engineering side when he started the policy side. It started out as just the two of us).

I know what the strategy was, I know why it did it, because I was in the meetings to decide those strategies, and know what leadership wanted and approved.

What, precisely, is your source of information to contradict this?

Because it neither accords with history or reality, as far as i can tell.

(I left DC in 2012, so i can't speak to anything that happened afterwards)

Since you were there, what are some examples of lonely fights that Google fought for consumers, that weren't in their own business interests?
I found Adwords for Domains a pretty questionable way to make money, as it subsidized the domain grabbing industry, and I find it hard to find the value for either advertisers or users that they otherwise claim for search ads.
I don't think your experience contradicts my comment. At the time, they thought that was something worthwhile for them to do. They definitely did a lot of things that helped their reputation in the past. Google could do no wrong. Then their priorities changed and they did different things.

I'd be wrong if Google actually went out of their way and did things that were contrary to their business interests.

So if you were there, please explain why google supports ALEC and conservative republican senators like Inhofe?

Google doesn't share anything in common with people like him, other than not wanting to be sued by the govt. When I was at Google, there was a lot of complaining about this support and no explanation.

That's revisionist and silly.
Seems perfectly accurate to me.

They are no different than any other company and claiming that they are somehow exceptional is what seems silly in my opinion.

Can anyone who needs to say 'don't be evil' really be trusted?

It betrays a certain disingeniousness, an implicit assumption of unaccountable power and a conscious decision to adopt a strategy of placating the public with platitudes up front and maybe doing something altogether different behind the scenes. Power always concentrates itself and does strange things to people.

Google, Facebook and a lot of the SV culture is beginning to look sinister, they don't seem grounded to human values and present a future vision that is cold, alienated, soulless and totalitarian in an techno-elitist way.

You can't wish away people, and unemployed people create instability and an unviable system. Whether it is robotics or AI and keeping aside whether these are possible in any realistic way, for the people who accept this the only way to keep the system stable will involve evil.

If folks want to join the movement the staff is building, you can get involved here: https://citizensagainstmonopoly.org/

If you want to do more than that, here is some more information on the staff, story and other action items: https://goo.gl/9a7KkC

Using URL shorteners here in general is inappropriate.

Choosing to use Google's URL shortener in this context is beyond ironic.

The target of the link is actually something hosted on Google Docs as http://checkshorturl.com/expand.php?u=https://goo.gl/9a7KkC will tell you so in this particular case it does not make a difference.
> Time and time again we are reminded why corporations will evolve to become as greedy and as protective of their turf expansive of their power and monopolistic as they can get, even if good people are running them.

Because if they didn't, they would be replaced by organizations (or people within the organization) who will. (I want to say that's Stanslaw Lem's law of bureaucracy?)

This would matter if think-tanks were independent academic research organizations. They aren't. They're basically mini-PACs or mini-ad agencies. You pay them to publish research that supports your corporate positions. That's how they make money.

Calling them "evil" is like calling a customer "evil".

I've never seen anything like the censoring by Google and Youtube over the last few weeks. Ron Paul of all people got all his videos demonetized for being "controversial". The most disgusting thing to me is that they don't delete the videos because they don't actually break any policies but they instead remove them from search and remove the ability to comment or share the videos, stifling any potential discussion.
I think the only reason people aren't yet as afraid of Google as they were Microsoft circa 1996-2000, is that Google has yet to fully flex its ability to abuse its monopoly (not to mention there are a few other equally powerful juggernaut companies roaming tech now). That appears to be starting to change. No question the anti-trust hearings come next, the DOJ will pursue them over the next five years.

The supposedly business friendly Republicans now view them as a left-wing enemy, so a party shield (regarding anti-trust intervention) will not exist going forward. Obama kept them from DOJ interest during his time in office because of how close they all were, that's also not likely to be seen again in a future Democrat administration. Should be easy to carve them into pieces, with search + adsense + adwords on one side, and one or two other companies getting everything else. The new Search Co would then be put under a ten year government dictated operational agreement that would limit some of its abusive behavior.

Let me see, the title reads "Open Markets Applauds X" where X is a court verdict against those who're funding the think tank that produced the article.

Regardless of the content of the article or the fairness of the court's decision, the title itself is inflammatory and nothing less than indicative of someone having a beef and thumbing their nose at Google.

The lack of self-awareness on part of whoever came up with that title is astounding.

I disagree that the title's author wasn't (self-)aware of Google being one of the think tank's sponsors; I think the author was indeed aware but somehow deluded themselves into thinking that the think tank could live up to the ideals of being truly independent while taking corporate funds.

What title do you suggest could have been less inflammatory but still convey the same message?

Think tank is just a more palatable way of saying lobbyist group with integrity. Lobbyists have always pushed the interests of their donors.
> I disagree that the title's author wasn't (self-)aware of Google being one of the think tank's sponsors; I think the author was indeed aware but somehow deluded themselves into thinking that the think tank could live up to the ideals of being truly independent while taking corporate funds.

Let me take it to an absurd extreme and suggest the following title:

"Google Lost and Can Go Suck My D"

Last I checked it still qualifies as "truly independent thinking".

> What title do you suggest could have been less inflammatory but still convey the same message?

Was something like "Open Markets and European Commission's Finding Regarding Google" too hard?

edit: nitpick, but "Finding Against X" sounds incorrect. Finding is about something, not for or against. Verdict could be for or against. Given the title itself, I don't exactly have high expectations about the quality of the article which I haven't read yet.

It's a think tank, not a newswire. It has policy positions and opinions. It's completely expected for them to write articles and titles applauding or "regretting" policy moves.

Applauding and regretting and whatnot are both leagues more respectful than your outlandish example.

> Applauding and regretting and whatnot are both leagues more respectful

Oh, now you're favoring "respect" over "truly independent thinking"? How odd.

Would you please stop posting inflammatory and uncivil comments to HN? Especially on divisive topics, where they act as flamebait.

We're hoping for a higher quality of discussion here and that requires maintaining a slightly artificial level of self-discipline when annoyed, regardless of what we're annoyed by.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't say that, and you're (probably intentionally) misreading my post.

Your original complaint was that they insulted Google by taking a policy stance against them, and that they might as well have made a title regarding sex acts. I was telling you that is ridiculous.

What? Wait! I can't follow...

The article doesn't even say that Schmidt called for the guy's head. It seems to have been the Foundation's decision. That's arguably a spineless move, but then again it's probably in their interest.

And what, exactly, would be ethically wrong about stopping funding for an institution you no longer agree with? After all, every single donation to charity is based on the principle that those giving agree with the organisations' aims. If the ACLU started a large campaign arguing for the extinction of puppies, would I be ethically wrong to quit?

If you want research isolated from such pressures, your best bet happens to be government, by the way. There are layers upon layers of isolation between the funding decision and actual scientists that, apart from the occasional right-wing propaganda misrepresenting individual projects, you're measured by the only yardstick that should count: how many papers you get into high impact journals.

Are you being oblivious on purpose? It strains credibility to think that Schmidt and Google didn't like a blog post by a think tank they funded generously to criticize them. I'm pretty confident they acted to get it taken down and wanted him gone. Suppose that wasn't the case, what conceivable reason would there before for kicking them out? The tank says: "it was a shared decision to kick them out". The other side: "they kicked us out because of this".
I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I just consider it somewhat possible that Schmidt simply complained, and the administrators got cold feet and made that decision. The people being fired are unlikely to know what Schmidt may or may not have discussed with the administration.

Anyway, that's not the point. The question is: why should someone not be allowed to change their funding decisions when the organisations they're funding go down a path they disagree with? Why should anybody be forced to continue to finance people after they've become the opposition.

Note also that Schmidt used to be the Chairman at this think tank, meaning that he is not just providing funding, but part of the academic community in its orbit, with a legitimate stake to disagree on the merits of the science.