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How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

(www.nytimes.com)
203 points tysone | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 11:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.622s | source
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getpost ◴[20 Nov 24 23:05 UTC] No.42199072[source]▶
If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable.

I don't wish to facilitate corporate crime, and it's obvious that some of Google's anti-competitive behavior is unlawful. But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment.

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lancesells ◴[20 Nov 24 23:23 UTC] No.42199195[source]▶
> If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication.

Wow. This is the opposite of how I feel. Mega-corporations should have their communications logged at a much higher level than a normal business. The things that have come out in court show how they manipulated their customers (advertisers). Regardless of how you feel about advertising a portion of those companies are small mom and pop shops trying to get by. If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

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mattmaroon ◴[20 Nov 24 23:26 UTC] No.42199221[source]▶
“ If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.”

I’m surprised to see someone advocating for “if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to hide” on HN. The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here!

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kibwen ◴[20 Nov 24 23:35 UTC] No.42199295[source]▶
No, please stop with this false equivalence. People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.
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1. akoboldfrying ◴[21 Nov 24 02:19 UTC] No.42200419[source]▶
Suppose a group of people agree amongst themselves to work together to produce and sell a good or service.

Are these people entitled to the rights you're talking about? They're people, so I think you must say that they are.

OTOH, to all intents and purposes these people are behaving like a corporation. How can it be that corporations are denied those rights, but groups of people that behave exactly like corporations -- that are corporations, in all but name -- are entitled to them?

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2. mattmaroon ◴[21 Nov 24 02:33 UTC] No.42200501[source]▶
Because corporations are bad that’s why!
3. oarsinsync ◴[21 Nov 24 23:48 UTC] No.42209860[source]▶
> OTOH, to all intents and purposes these people are behaving like a corporation. How can it be that corporations are denied those rights, but groups of people that behave exactly like corporations -- that are corporations, in all but name -- are entitled to them?

A collection of individuals operating in principle like they’re an LLC, but not contained within an LLC, don’t get the protections that an LLC get. They get individual personal unlimited liability.

For the same reasons that me operating as an individual gets taxed as an individual, but me operating through a LLC wrapper gets taxed as an LLC.

We’ve made up these arbitrary rules whereby LLCs (sometimes) get a different set of rules to real people.

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4. akoboldfrying ◴[22 Nov 24 01:16 UTC] No.42210331[source]▶
True, this is an important distinction that I neglected to mention.

Nevertheless I don't see liability or tax differences as fundamental: I think that, even if there was no legal concept of a corporation being a (kind of) person with special protections, functionally similar structures could and would arise. We already have liability-waiving EULAs everywhere for software, which 99% of people accept without a second thought; perhaps this concept would be much more widespread.

I also think that most people who complain about "corporations" don't carefully distinguish them from other ways of clumping people together for business reasons, like partnerships or trusts -- I think the resentment is mainly around the size and wealth of these clumps. And I think that the differentially wealth-generating tendency of all these people-clumping arrangements comes primarily from the efficiencies (and additional possibilities) afforded by letting the people in them specialise their work, rather than from liability and tax differences.

But admittedly that's my own speculation.