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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> If training focuses on just not sounding like you do illegal things instead of just not doing illegal things, that’s the problem.

No, that isn't the problem.

The problem is that the difference between violating the law and not violating the law is whether you used what the court/jury felt to be inappropriate language. "Not sounding like you do illegal things" is how you avoid violating the law. Your actions are less relevant than your commentary on those actions directed to your friends.

That's why the training focuses on using the right magic words and tabooing the wrong ones. The training is there to help you follow the law, no matter how stupid the law might be.

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> "Not sounding like you do illegal things" is how you avoid violating the law.

only if the regulators investigating you are complete morons, which may be the case once in a while, but I doubt it is for any large case like this one.

regulators see straight through doublespeak and careful wording. buzzwords and corporate lingo are completely transparent to anyone who spends a single moment thinking about the message that the words are conveying, and regulators have far more experience cutting through that stuff than just about anyone else.

You are not really engaging with these training materials in context. The entire point of the training is to not draw conclusions in areas in which you are not an expert, in discoverable media. For example, you are a software developer. Writing to your colleague that this change-list reduces an algorithm from quadratic to linear time complexity is within your wheelhouse. Posting on a mailing list that you think some other team's product will crush the competition is not really within your domain, because you are not an economist. Drawing conclusions of law is the worst of all things to do because even though you're just some idiot, those conclusions become discoverable and opposing council will put them on the record out of context even though you are just a Junior Associate Moron, not a person in a position to draw that conclusion.

So executives, marketing people etc. can say that their products “will crush the competition” and that would be fine?

> Moron

Not so much because they might making some incorrect conclusions but because they don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

Well the training as I remember it is not really about how to fix your attitude, it is about how to avoid this gotcha. The thing is, opposing counsel would never be allowed to ask a deponent to draw a conclusion of law in a deposition. If they asked you do you think such and such thing is anticompetitive, your lawyer will object and you won’t have to answer. But, if you had emailed your pal at work and volunteered that you think something is anticompetitive, that’s admissible, even though you still aren’t qualified to draw that conclusion. Then at trial they will say “Google knew this was anticompetitive!” even though the member of the organization who “knew” this was a probationary sys admin.

When one actually suspects that something is anticompetitive, subverts the privacy policy, or is against the law, the done thing is to go talk to an attorney. Either product counsel inside the company if you are just curious or concerned in good faith, or your own attorney if you think the company is acting in bad faith.

> regulators see straight through doublespeak and careful wording

No they don't, Microsoft didn't do this training and got nailed for bundling internet explorer with windows. Then Microsoft and all other big tech companies started to police words and look, no big anti trust like that has happened in US since. As long as Microsoft says "we always open edge no matter the settings when you click links in our products to ensure the best customer experience", instead of "we always open edge to increase edge market share", they wont get nailed in USA.

> No they don't, Microsoft didn't do this training and got nailed for bundling internet explorer with windows.

you are saying that regulators can't see through this then giving an example of them seeing through it.

If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend watching David Boies interview Bill Gates for his deposition in Microsoft’s antitrust trial. The whole thing is on YouTube and it’s fascinating.

They spend a lot of time parsing just what Gates and others on his executive team meant by things like “cut off [Netscape’s] air supply”.

Regardless of who you think “wins” these exchanges, the government thought that putting Gates in a position where he had to explain this kind of language would be embarrassing and discrediting.

It worked.

yes, I know. my whole point is that regulators aren't stupid and can see straight through naive corporate efforts to hide what is actually happening.

No one ever got busted for anti-trust violations by doing things that help support the competition.

Describing something in terms of helping the competition while actually doing the opposite, will get you dunked on doubly so. If you think equivocation is they to doing illegal things, my dear poster, snap out of it and feel the Terra firma, because you're so high, the FAA can do an airspeed check.

> No one ever got busted for anti-trust violations by doing things that help support the competition.

Actually anti-trust training I have gone through mostly emphasizes that you should never ever help the competition or talk to them, because that sounds like forming an illegal oligopoly.

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