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

[djoldman]

https://archive.ph/TjqZ0

[TradingPlaces]

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

[jhp123]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[elteto]

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

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

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

[jedberg]

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

This email is the perfect example of that.

[nonameiguess]

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

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

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

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

[technick]

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

[ycombinatornews]

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

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

[eqvinox]

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

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

[badrequest]

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

[aragonite]

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

[havnagiggle]

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

[noddingham]

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

[pests]

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

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

[supriyo-biswas]

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

[choppaface]

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

[Gibbon1]

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

[eviks]

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

[pests]

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

[oneepic]

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

[otoburb]

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

[ugexe]

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

[qingcharles]

Jerry is a real jerk.

[shadowgovt]

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

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

[imchillyb]

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

On what grounds?

Because the documents really damage our case!

[imchillyb]

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

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

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

[sexy_seedbox]

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

[say_it_as_it_is]

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

[supriyo-biswas]

Were any other documents other than [1] released?

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

[einpoklum]

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

[vinay_ys]

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

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

[beej71]

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

And legal and ethical and benefiting the end-user.

[slwpsldmcngjt]

Approx. when will this trial end?

[senorrib]

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

[agentgumshoe]

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

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

[gpderetta]

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

[1] some sort of AI arbitrator I guess?

[dang]

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

[Obscurity4340]

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

[minerva23]

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

[cassepipe]

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

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

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

[jcranmer]

That article was about the judge being asked to rule whether or not the documents can be posted. It was updated today to reflect the actual ruling that they could be posted. So not a dupe.

[passwordoops]

Not a duplicate (maybe read the articles first?). And even if it is, keep this news on the front page until the end of the trial. It's by far the most important thing going on in the tech space right now, except maybe the anti-trust suit against Amazon (which should also be front-page every day once that trial starts)

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...

[ChrisArchitect]

Apologies, while the general dupe problem is annoying, it was misleading that the linked article shared 5 days ago was updated without notice to include the latest bloomberg info so it looks like it was news from 5 days ago.

[sophacles]

Im glad it got posted again, it's news to me. Sadly my life includes things other than browsing HN for the latest headline, so I occasionally miss news.