Oddbean

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do - a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." 17/

Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case": https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic After initially deferring to Google, #JudgeAmitMehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's *wild*: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf 18/

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance #MichaelRoszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration." OK. 19/

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created...illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics...[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side...(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales." 20/

It goes on to say that this might change, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue." "Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 #Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." 21/

Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit." And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics...supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. 22/

As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company." In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses - like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones - with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars - enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year - to be the default search everywhere. 23/

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers." 24/

For many, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users, sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us. But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it): https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar 25/

#JohnDeere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and *then* uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. 26/

Companies that *can* sell you out, *will* sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or - in the case of tech platforms - customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc: https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554 27/

Which is where the *next* stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in - and then lock in - business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders. For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). 28/

Some of those rackets are well-known, like #JediBlue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. #MeganGray - ex-#FTC, ex-#DuckDuckGo - was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it. 29/