Bad Results
Google turned 25 this year. What began as a janky jumble of bright colors and text in the late nineties has grown into a tech behemoth - it dominates webmail, phone software, browsers, and maps. All of this grew from its core product - search, and the giant advertising platform bolted on top.
Ryan Broderick has written an excellent history of Google’s rise, and its pivot from the website everyone used find things and answer questions into…whatever the hell it is now. People who lived through the site’s ascendence can now watch with curiosity or mild horror as Google devolves into a digital Times Square - skyline full of blinding ads hawking questionable products, the stores beneath them selling overpriced shit you probably don’t need. Wide avenues full of confused people, blundering into one another as they furiously type ‘Sbarro’s near me’ into their phones.
Really, Google is like being trapped in Times Square, because it has so deeply ingrained itself in the digital experience that we can’t escape it. There’s a word for this kind of market dominance, and coincidentally the company is currently in court defending itself against claims it is a monopoly.
When a company is publicly traded, it’s required to provide transparency into its finances so investors can decide whether to buy or sell its stock. These quarterly reports are often long and full of legalese and numbers and company executives get on earnings calls to explain them to bankers.
For a long time, tech companies have claimed their business operations are trade secrets, and divulging any details would irreparably harm them. So, it’s no surprise that the company has sought to keep as much of its antitrust trial as redacted as possible:
Now as the case, U.S. et al. v. Google, enters its third week in court, it is shaping up to be perhaps the most secretive antitrust trial of the last few decades. Not only has Google argued for the landmark trial to be largely closed off to the public, but so have other companies that are involved, such as Apple and Microsoft. Apple even fought to quash subpoenas, describing them as “unduly burdensome,” to get its executives out of giving testimony.
This may seem a little odd to you, a person who does not run a multibillion-dollar tech monopoly, but these companies claim revealing the details of deals between them would bring on financial ruin. Why is that, exactly?
One reason could be that Google pays an estimated $18 to 20 billion dollars per year to Apple to be the default search on iPhones. You are reading that correctly. Google pays more than most tech companies are worth to just Apple, to lock in its search monopoly on a single device. Perhaps Apple also doesn’t want the general public to know about this arrangement because, you know, controlling its users access to the web is also kinda monopoly-sounding?
One thing that tends to happen during DoJ trials, since the government has more robust subpoena and investigative powers than the average civil plaintiff, is that internal company communications are entered into the record. Why is this a problem, if Google’s executives were simply doing smart business?
“I know we are insisting on default, but at the same time I think we should encourage them to have Yahoo as a choice in the pull down or some other easy option,” Pichai wrote of the agreement, which is at the center of the government’s case. “I don’t think it is a good user experience nor the optics is great for us to be the only provider in the browser.”
That is current Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was in charge of Google Chrome at the time, telling Google’s founders it would be a bad look to pay Apple to be the only search option. Awkward!
Google is no stranger to monopoly lawsuits - it settled one over its app store just last month, and the EU has hit the company with repeated lawsuits over its behavior. It went to war with Australia over whether it should pay publishers who create the content it serves up in search results. A similar conflict is ongoing in Canada.
You could argue that these types of lawsuits are a cost of doing business - that Google’s runaway success has made it a ripe target, and governments and competitors will come after it to clip its wings, or extract a payout from its overflowing coffers. However, a more practical person might ask - has all this success made Google a better, or even a good product for consumers?
Obviously, the answer is no. Google’s core value proposition - finding stuff on the Internet - has gotten gradually and then precipitously worse in recent years. And its flailing attempts to keep up with the ephemeral ‘AI race’ have only poured gasoline on the dumpster fire. Here are some of the hits.
Gmail has started hallucinating:
According to New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, Bard isn't the helpful inbox assistant that Google apparently wants it to be — at least yet. In his testing, says Roose, the AI hallucinated entire email correspondences that never took place.
Search is indexing conversations with it’s Bard AI:
SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra observed that Google Search had begun to index shared Bard conversational links into its search results pages, potentially exposing information users meant to be kept contained or confidential.
Apparently you can melt eggs:
"Yes, an egg can be melted," reads the incorrect Google Search result shared by Glaiel and confirmed by Ars Technica. "The most common way to melt an egg is to heat it using a stove or microwave."
Human authorship is no longer necessary:
Google recently tweaked the documentation explaining how it defines "helpful content." No longer is it "helpful content written by people, for people," but simply, "Helpful content written for people."
These stories are grimly funny, but they highlight the big, unaddressed problem with Google. By turning its search product into Times Square instead of the Library of Alexandria, the company has ceded control over the veracity of its search results to the sleaziest, cleverest scammers out there. And the scammers are much, much smarter than Google’s engineers:
"Cocaine for sale here," the page hosted on the FDA's website said alongside a telephone number and a handle for the encrypted-messaging app Wickr. "Buy crystal meth online."
The culprit is a recent change by Google that makes defacing websites with advertisements for where to buy cocaine, heroin, meth, ketamine, Xanax, black-market Ozempic, ecstasy, and other drugs suddenly a viable way to find customers.
All of this sucks, because even if the government wins an overwhelming victory against Google and forces it to decouple itself from every phone on the planet, and maybe sell off or split up its ad business so it’s not the driving force behind every decision it makes on search, there isn’t anything to take its place.
For two decades we had a reasonably effective tool to find shit, to answer the questions we had about the world, or where to find good Indian food. Now we’ve got a confused, hallucinating tangle of SEO-optimized blog detritus, mixed with a healthy pinch of disinformation, nestled beneath ads for snake oil. We got so used to Google, so comfortable with its place in our lives as an unbiased arbiter of truth, that we allowed it to become the only source of information, and the people running it became so fabulously wealthy they no longer had to give a shit whether that information was true or not.
Disinfo
If Google were focusing more of its time on the integrity of its search results, it might be forced to grapple with the fact that one of its main ‘sources’ for news has become an unusable cesspit of bigotry and disinformation. I’m talking, of course, about Twitter, which I will not call X Dot Com or The Site Formerly Known As because it is not worth giving Elon Musk’s ridiculous rebrand any oxygen.
Last month, the EU warned Musk that his site was in violation of new laws meant to combat disinfo and dangerous propaganda:
“X, formerly Twitter … is the platform with the largest ratio of mis/disinformation followed by Facebook,” [Vera Jourova] told reporters.
Obviously Musk does not care about laws, or his company’s violation of them, so it remains to be seen what the EU can and will do to Twitter. If Europeans are lucky, they will ban its use, which will be doing everyone a favor, because the site has pivoted from being the place to find information about breaking news into the main purveyor of fake news:
Experts say that under Elon Musk the platform has deteriorated to the point that it's not just failing to clamp down on misinformation but is favoring posts by accounts that pay for its blue-check subscription service, regardless of who runs them.
The war in Gaza has simply lit another match in the box of matches inflaming the rampant propaganda and sleaze on Twitter, and the site’s owner has been unable to remain on the sidelines:
As false information about the rapidly changing war between Gaza Strip militants and Israel proliferated on the social media platform X over the weekend, owner Elon Musk personally recommended that users follow accounts notorious for promoting lies.
Right, of course. The problem with a site like Twitter going rapidly from a platform for real journalists to disseminate real news to a degenerate message board whose owner personally boosts anonymous trolls with meme avatars is that sites like Google still treat Twitter as a legitimate source of information. Tweets about breaking news still appear in search results. Every day Google fails to grapple with what Twitter has become, its search results become more polluted with dangerous propaganda.
Google is not the only tech giant sitting idly by while its systems regurgitate conspiracy theories. Amazon’s shambling corpse of a digital assistant department has fallen victim as well:
Asked about fraud in the race — in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.
Very good! And, not to ignore the biggest offender by volume, Facebook has gutted teams dedicated to keeping the site relatively free of disinfo. Even their Twitter competitor Threads has explicitly said it wants to keep the platform free of ‘news and politics’ to discuss, uh, I guess whatever else people talk about. Facebook has been attempting a retreat from what it considers ‘news’ for years, in part to avoid having to pay publishers whose articles generate its ad views. Facebook has throttled traffic to news sites, preferring to keep its users trapped in the hell that is the endless scroll of photos, ads, and I guess election conspiracy theories.
What happens when every source Americans used to get facts and news have abandoned the cause of accuracy? Google doesn’t care whether its search shows you wrong or malicious results. Facebook doesn’t want you reading the news, or discussing it. Twitter will only show you offensive videos and posts from the dumbest racists on the planet, egged on by an army of anonymous cretins. The current form of the Internet sucks, because the companies making billions off it sucking don’t see any financial upside to making it suck less.
Fracking
We talked literally last week about all the harm that fracking does to the planet. So it is fitting that mere days later, Exxon has put in a $60 billion dollar bid to buy a huge fracking company with leases all across Texas and New Mexico. Markets have responded to this massive investment - Exxon’s biggest in more than two decades - by pointing out the obvious:
“It signifies that there’s a little bit more rationality coming into the energy transition. The fantasy world of having just renewables as electricity within 50 years or so is now clearly not going to happen,” Jay Hatfield, CEO of Infrastructure Capital Advisors, an investment firm that focuses on energy and infrastructure investments, told Fortune. “It’s a recognition that these forms of energy are not going away anytime soon.”
Well, yes. As long as oil giants who covered up evidence of climate change for decades despite their scientists predicting it since the seventies keep paying billions for the right to extract more oil and gas from deep underground, the energy transition seems less and less likely to happen. When companies like Exxon are given carte blanche to suck precious groundwater from wherever they please and use it to extract resources, they will in fact continue to do so!
Also, if states like Texas continue to award massive contracts to ‘bury’ the carbon emissions from companies like Exxon, oil executives can continue to insist they are working towards a ‘carbon neutral’ future, which is one where they continue to make billions drilling and selling oil while filling some of the holes in the earth with the byproducts of their unchecked extraction.
There is something truly perverse about the idea of selling rights to drill oil out of the sea floor, and selling another set of rights to pump carbon back into it - a technology that, to be clear, has not yet been proven to work. As with most things in the American economy, it’s all good as long as the government continues to subsidize looking the other way as we rapidly destroy fragile ecosystems and accelerate the planet’s inexorable march towards catastrophe.
Debunking
There are a few areas in which exposing inaccuracies and fraud in data can actually still do some good. One is academia, where we’ve seen a whole bunch of research papers get debunked in recent years. A trio of plucky scientists is behind some of the higher profile cases:
“Once you see the pattern across many different papers, it becomes like a one in quadrillion chance that there’s some benign explanation,” said Simmons, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the trio who report their work on a blog called Data Colada.
Data Colada! The origin story of the blog and its owners is extremely steeped in White Guy academia:
The origins of Data Colada stretch back to Princeton University in 1999. Simmons and Nelson, fellow grad-school students, played in a cover band called Gibson 5000 and a softball team called the Psychoplasmatics.
The work they do, however, is important. The group coined the term ‘p-hacking’ in 2014, which describes cherry-picking data to support a researcher’s conclusions. Often, such data manipulation doesn’t stand up to outside scrutiny - remember Blue Zones - but so much research is published all over the world, it’s often hard to spot frauds with only a handful of academics bothering to check their work.
Laypeople might reasonably assume that published research is all peer-reviewed, meaning it’s subjected to at least cursory scrutiny or results are tested by others to verify accuracy. But, again, so much stuff is published that, say, the president of Stanford might skate by for years despite building his career on faulty lab data. Who has time to check all that stuff when your grant money depends on you publishing new stuff? Great system!
You may remember the story of the Harvard professor who fabricated work on, of all things, lying. She’s currently on leave and the school is seeking to revoke her tenure. She’s also suing the Data Colada gang for $25 million dollars in damages. So, you know, even fact checking research has its risks.
Chicken
Last week we talked about Agri Stats, one of the many tools the poultry industry uses to make more money by fixing consumer prices. Another thing the industry has done in the last couple years is simply raise prices and keep them there, despite underlying costs remaining mostly flat.
So it’s no surprise that producers have decided (again) to keep prices high, this time by dialing back production:
Chicken prices at U.S. grocery stores have hit record highs and should stay elevated as Tyson Foods and other companies dial back poultry production to boost margins while inflation-weary shoppers buy chicken instead of beef and pork.
What a weird coincidence that the handful of companies who produce most of the country’s chicken are all cutting production! In addition to gouging consumers, the companies have laid off workers across the country due to their own mismanagement:
Arkansas-based Tyson, which sells all three types of meat, had to deal with a glut of chicken after earning massive profits when meat prices soared during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company announced the closures of six U.S. chicken plants with nearly 4,700 employees this year to reduce costs. Its chicken business likely returned to profitability in the quarter ended Sept. 30 after two quarters of operating losses, analysts said.
Ahh, free market capitalism. When meat prices go up (because you raised them) and you produce too much meat, you can blame labor costs, fire a bunch of people, and keep prices high. What a system.
Short Cons
FT - “Singapore may subject luxury assets, including cars, watches and handbags, to anti-money laundering controls and increase scrutiny of single family offices as the Asian financial hub reels from a S$2.8bn (US$2bn) money-laundering scandal.”
NYT - “A Long Island man was charged on Tuesday with smuggling $200,000 worth of deceased, protected butterflies, including exceptionally large ones known as birdwings, and other insects into and out of the United States.”
AEA Web - “This paper shows that partisan cable news broadcasts have a causal effect on the size and composition of budgets in US localities. Using exogenous channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we show that exposure to the conservative Fox News channel reduces revenues and expenditures.”
Daily Progress - ““I had a couple clarifying questions for you,” Ball says at the start of the call. “The 30K, the terms of it, as I understand it, are basically three appearances on the show.””
NYT - “These drugs are blockbusters because they promise to solve a medical problem that is also a cultural problem — how to cure the moral crisis of fat bodies that refuse to get and stay thin.”
SEC - “The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Matthew Motil, host of the podcast, “The Cash Flow King,” for fraudulently raising approximately $11 million from more than 50 investors in a Ponzi scheme involving notes that were purportedly backed by residential properties.”
Vulture - ““The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.””
NYT - “The Internal Revenue Service said on Thursday that it was freezing a pandemic-era employer tax benefit that has been a magnet for fraud and has cost the federal government billions of dollars as the agency looks for ways to stop the program from being abused.”
More Perfect Union - “More than half of all U.S. kids aged 6 to 16 are spending time on a video gaming app that could be exploiting them, with anti-consumer practices that are described as “child labor.””
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