I'm no Google apologist, but there's nothing nefarious about this. Why on earth would any company encourage its employees to speculate and talk freely, when doing so would get them into legal/PR trouble. It's the equivalent of a lawyer telling his client to go drinking and have a fun night out with the district attorney.<p>Rule #1: Never talk to the police without your lawyer being present<p>Rule #2: Don't create a paper trail that is going to make you look bad when it gets subpoenaed<p>I personally think that Google needs to be broken up into 10 different companies. And I would love to live in a world where companies face antitrust enforcement because of concrete actions. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a carelessly worded email is going to cause you more legal troubles than actual anti-competitive behavior.
I don't see what the point of the article might be (except as click bait to get ad views, of course). I had exactly the same training when I worked at IBM, every year. "Never talk about dominating the market", yadda yadda yadda. It's sound legal advice that I would expect all corporate employees would get. VMWare won't want their employees to talk about how they dominate the VM indusrty; EMC wouldn't want their engineers talking about their enterprise storasge arrays "crushing the competition", and so on.<p>And at all companies, the standard line is, "never send in e-mail anything that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times, or might cause you to be deposed as a witness in a courtroom." And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.<p>All of this is not unique to Google, but applies to any company with half-way competent lawyers and a half-way competent HR department.
It would be noteworthy if a company didn't restrict their employees from publicly talking about legal and regulatory matters. What they're doing here is standard practice.<p>Average employees aren't in a position to speak accurately about antitrust matters anyway. If they misspeak, it will certainly be used against the company regardless of the actual merit.
Once again, it seems the issue is less about Google (or any company) restricting you having a personal opinion about issues that affect the bottom line at work, but instead is about the disingenuous pretense that they don't restrict you.<p>Don't be evil. Unless it affects our bottom line. Think Different. Unless you're a monopoly, then think the same as every other monopoly has. Move fast and break things. Their things, not our things.<p>Cut the shit "Make us money" is the corporate manifesto.
Based on past incidents, I'd venture that Google employees are free to speak up only as long as they speak up with the "right" opinions on a vast range of topics. "You can say whatever you want, as long as it's this".
Googler here. This is pure and simple click-bait. We are asked not to speculate on legal matters precisely so that it doesn't get misrepresented in the media or in lawsuits. I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?<p>Since the NYT is denied the option of misrepresenting employee comments, it has settled for an alternate spin. What a great deal they have. Its a win-win.
It's unfortunate that the headline sounds like pure clickbait, because the story contains examples of Google's behavior being more suspicious than the headline suggests.<p>But, as far as the title is concerned, it seems common sense to prevent employees from talking about potentially very expensive legal issues, when every internal emails and chat logs can be potentially quote-mined by adversaries in future lawsuits.<p>(Disclaimer: worked at Google before.)
FWIW, my employer probably also wouldn't like me commenting on imminent legal issues that risked affecting their bottom line, but they don't mind me talking about much else politically speaking.<p>This is a twist on the famous Upton Sinclair quote. Google has everything to gain by extending their "live at work" strategy to political conversations, until those political conversations affect them.
Byline: "A company operating in the shadow of government regulators has some very particular rules about what workers can say about it."<p>I don't know where the reporter gets the sense that they're "very particular." It's pretty common sense: "You are not a lawyer; don't speculate on points of law in discoverable media."
I'm sure lawyers at Google have studied the Microsoft antitrust case, where one of the big lessons was that anything you write in an email will be used against you by the Justice Department [1] -- so this is not at all surprising. In fact, I'm a bit shocked there's no mention of the Microsoft case in the article.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/02/business/antitrust-case-is-highlighting-role-of-e-mail.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/02/business/antitrust-case-i...</a>
This is normal and expected. Where I work we have rules about what we can say in written communication. Hyperbole and jokes will not be interpreted that way if an audit or subpoena finds it. A court might decide that we didn't mean exactly what we said, but we don't even want to deal with a court case in the first place. Not only because it directly consumes money to put up a defense but also because it can restrict our ability to make money and could tarnish our name.<p>We also have rules against talking to press. We can send them to a department that will handle that communication, but in general they won't get anything from us because it's easy to put a negative spin on anything we say.
To me this is the key paragraph:<p>> ...employees are told to assume that every document and email will end up in the hands of regulators, so they should refrain from using certain words or phrases. “We are not out to ‘crush,’ ‘kill,’ ‘hurt,’ ‘block,’ or do anything else that might be perceived as evil or unfair,” according to a slide used in the training, which The New York Times reviewed.<p>In my experience, these policies exist largely to avoid negative PR hits.
The article is a nice piece of spin. It seems they started with a narrative and fit the facts to it.<p>I've taken the trainings referred to in the article and I never once thought they were designed to dissuade discussions about antitrust issues. A more banal interpretation is that Google wants to create a culture that emphasizes creating good products not at the expense of competitors.<p>I've never felt inhibited about having conversations with employees about these issues. The fact is that most of the employees I've discussed these issues with don't think Google is violating antitrust regulations.<p>My personal opinion is that a certain segment believe that Google should just be broken up because their data collection practices whether or not there are any real antitrust violations and just see this as a tool to accomplish that end.
Anti-trust is a hack.. We need proper taxation. Large corporations like Google have TONS of advantages that small companies have so it's easier for big companies to get bigger.<p>Part of this is taxes... if we just taxed them properly they wouldn't grow large and wouldn't need to be broken up.
Have you ever seen a current Google employee clearly denounce Google's privacy practices? It seems they are very loud and keen to organize when it comes to issues that closely affect them, but the mass surveillance of the general population usually takes a back seat.
So that everyone is clear there's a very big difference between Google saying:<p>1) Use the right language concerning things like 'market dominance'.<p>2) Not wanting Googlers to have public opinions which are against the companies opinions<p>3) Suppressing voices over very material causes for concern i.e. whistle blowing.<p>The more nuanced issue is #1.<p>If Google legit doesn't believe they are a monopoly player, then they have to make sure that everyone acts and behaves in that manner, and uses the right language. If personnel go around talking about 'dominating the market' that could be effectively 'used against them' irrespective of the material nature of ostensible market domination.<p>A lot of this kind of stuff is vague, political, words have power etc. and things can be taken way out of context.<p>It's not wrong for Google to want staff to use the right words to describe market situations correctly.<p>Of course this means something different if in fact, objectively speaking they're trying to get people to actually misrepresent reality.
>Google employees are free to speak up, except on antitrust<p>And unionizing. Don't forget unionizing.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-workers.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/technology/google-fires-w...</a><p>I'm sure there's a few more things you can't talk about at Google too. But the NY Times should at least do a better job of remembering their own stories.
The title seems like a click bait. Generally you don't want employees to talk about active legal cases.<p>All companies will learn this the hard way when during the discovery the other team of lawyers bring casual internal conversation between employees as evidence into the court.
This is a pretty standard practice in big tech companies especially after the Microsoft v. U.S. case. When a seemingly naive internal memo can make the company broken up, then why would you allow your employee to write it down from the first moment?
> Ultimately, if the Justice Department or other regulators asked for those documents, Google would have the option of declaring them secret communication.<p>What if they just banned English from all company documents and let people use a smattering of all other languages the employees know? With some documents in Chinese, some in Swahili, some in Spanish, and the most confidential documents in obscure tribal languages, it would be fun to watch the Justice department try to piece things together.<p>For employee productivity they could just hand out AR goggles that translate everything in sight automatically to a language the employee knows -- they're Google, after all.<p>Or simply invent a company-specific language that uses the same words as English but with some words switched up, e.g. Customer -> Clown, Stock market -> Circus, Earnings -> Feast, etc.
Yup that's just literally every company... speculating about how "we will crush our competition and dominate the market" can lead to legal trouble more so than talking about other contentious topics.
Is this even legal? Can a company prevent employees from talking about the company breaking the law. I don't see how this could be enforceable. Assuming they are indeed found to have broken the law.
Folks need to grasp the distinction between the company requiring employees to be careful about using specific terms like 'market dominance' vs. speaking up.<p>Using terms like 'market dominance' may have legal implications, they surely will have populist implications as anti-trust issues are as much political as anything else.<p>So instructing staff to 'not speak about Google's market position' is very reasonable, because words have power and implications beyond what most employees probably believe when they're using them.<p>This is somewhat different from asking people to 'not have opinions' and a totally different league from trying to suppress whistle-blowers etc..
TRUTH is suppressed in the name of trust/loyalty/discipline/patriotism/sedition/job/national security/intellectual property etc <a href="https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014" rel="nofollow">https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014</a>
A little over a year ago, while working at Google I needed to work from home for personal reasons. HR told me “we have done extensive studies and it doesn’t work so take a personal leave”. Okay. In another issue I suggested to my manager we stop using “blacklist” and “whitelist”. He said no one else had a problem with those names and of this was a personal issue take it up with HR<p>Google will never change unless forced to. I quit soon after.
> Google employees are free to speak up<p>Try to show up for work in a MAGA hat, and see if you're still employed by lunch. Google employees are, at best, free to support the dogma approved by Google.
Does the NY times use a shitty AI bot to write these taglines? I find it hard to believe someone who worked as a journalist and wasn't in a coma for the last decade would suggest that google employees are "free to speak up".<p>Generally speaking (and regardless of personal position on the topic) any company which has a dedicated "diversity" commissar isn't a place you can speak freely.
><i>Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the last few years, they have openly confronted the company about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons.</i><p>I'd love to see what would happen to a Google employee who tries to argue that sexual harassment laws and policies are stifling normal social interactions, empowering the vicious and overly sensitive to destroy anyone who upsets their particular sensibilities, and creating an overall climate of fear and conformity.
It's commonplace for employment contracts to restrict your ability to represent the company to the press. Depending on the seniority and visibility of your position this may extend towards so-called "ethics clauses" where you will be in breach of your contract if you disparage the company or otherwise associate the company they don't want to be associated with.<p>Just look at Amy Cooper [1].<p>But it goes further than that. It's generally a good idea not to do anything that might lead to a heading like:<p>"Employee of X says [bad thing about X]"<p>When I worked at Google, I made it a point never to comment publicly on any issue or thread where I could possibly be quoted. That's just commonsense and (IMHO) completely reasonable for your employer. I'd suggest that if anyone chafes against such restrictions that they should probably seek other employment.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/woman-fired-by-franklin-templeton-after-backlash-from-racist-park-confrontation.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/woman-fired-by-franklin-temp...</a>