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Google is facing anti-monopoly enforcement action in the EU and the USA and the UK, with more to come, and the company is starting to get nervous.
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It's just issued guidance to employees advising them against using words in their internal comms that would be smoking guns in these investigations: "market," "barriers to entry," and "network effects" among them.
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust
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https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust
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The memo detailing the new linguistic rules leaked to @themarkup, with the anodyne title "Five Rules of Thumb for Written Communications.”
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-of-Thumb-for-Written-Communications.html
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https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7016657-Five-Rules-of-Thumb-for-Written-Communications.html
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The memo cites other companies that got into trouble when internal memos came to light, such as Microsoft's infamous stated internal goal of "cutting off Netscape's air supply." It advises workers to discuss their plans in pro-competition terms.
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Googlers are advised to discuss customer retention through product quality, not through "stickiness" or other euphemisms for lock-in; to explain how new products will succeed without "leveraging" existing successes, and to steer clear of "scale effects" as corporate goals.
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They're enjoined from celebrating Google's market dominance, to discuss how Google "dominates or controls" its markets, or even to estimate what share of a market Google controls. They're also not allowed to define their markets, which would let other estimate their share.
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This is going to make for some tortured backflips! Google's going to struggle to (say) improve "search" without defining what "search" is.
Ironically for a leaked doc, the doc advises the reader to assume every doc their produce will leak (!), but OTOH, points for realism.
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Ironically for a leaked doc, the doc advises the reader to assume every doc their produce will leak (!), but OTOH, points for realism.
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For me, the most interesting thing about the memo is that it marks a serious turning-point in the way that business leaders talk about competition. Peter Thiel famously said that "competition is for losers."
https://www.alleywatch.com/2015/08/according-peter-thiel-competition-loser/
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https://www.alleywatch.com/2015/08/according-peter-thiel-competition-loser/
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Thiel's the quiet-part-aloud guy, but he's not alone. Famous investors like Warren Buffet and Andreesen-Horowitz openly boast of a preference for investing in monopolies, and creating monopolies is Softbank's stated purpose.
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Every pirate wants to be an admiral. Capitalists who dream of dominance want competition. Capitalists who attain dominance want to abolish it.
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