US v. Google: A Family Debate, 20 Years in the Making

It all started in Albuquerque...

Sep 19, 2024

The practices called into question by US v. Google LLC would be illegal in any other industry, they should be illegal in tech too 😳 ⚖️ 😏
California’s new election deep-fake laws are the boldest ever seen — but even some of the most bullish privacy advocates question whether the tech exists for social media companies to actually enforce them 🤖 🗳
There’s a lot to hate about dating apps — but is there a hidden silver-lining that might actually be bringing us all closer together? 👨🏻‍❤️‍👩🏾📲
Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrants pull directly from the KKK playbook on immigration 🐶🐈
Can 17 people give AI an actual body in 7 years? Google aims to find out. 🤖🛠️🦵

My Take:

My brother and I followed similar paths in the early years: scholarship kids at Albuquerque Academy, undergrad at Harvard, PhD at Stanford. He paved the path for his younger siblings and showed us that big things were possible.

Around twenty years ago, there was a fork in the road and our paths diverged. He went into finance and headed to Wall Street, where he eventually became the CFO of a major financial institution. I took the entrepreneurial road toward Silicon Valley and built and then sold two data and AI companies that optimized pricing, segmentation, and analytics for digital advertising for media companies and marketers.

When we came home for Christmas and family holidays, we'd compare notes about what we were doing. He was operating at the red-hot center of financial markets, with an intense focus on software and data, but he also ran equities and securities divisions before becoming a CIO. Our holiday discussions over the dinner table in Albuquerque were always lively and interesting.

I was learning how Google's ad-serving platforms and exchanges worked, as the software we built needed to interoperate with much of Google's technology. When I described what I was seeing, he responded with a healthy dose of skepticism and a bit of incredulity. "Tommy, you must have gotten that wrong," he said. "What you're describing would be illegal in regulated financial markets - there's no way a company can front-run the market like that or operate on both sides of the trade!"

I questioned what I thought I knew and worked to understand it better. Ultimately, I confirmed what my eyes and my brain were telling me: Google was operating on all sides of the trade with extreme information asymmetry, for a long time.

My brother wasn't wrong either: what Google was doing was illegal -- and this week, the DOJ is saying so.

The DOJ's accusations reflect the same question we wrestled with all those years ago: if a financial company can't front-run the market and operate on both sides of a trade, why should a tech company be allowed to?

If the DOJ is victorious, this landmark trial might break the stranglehold Big Tech has on free, fair markets. The stakes couldn’t be higher and I, for one, am looking forward to the analysis at the next family meal.

In the meantime, buckle up. This is going to get interesting.

I’m Reading:

California Passes Election ‘Deepfake’ Laws, Forcing Social Media Companies to Take Action via NYTimes 🤖 🗳

Two of the laws signed Tuesday place limits on how election-related deepfakes — including those targeting candidates and officials or those questioning the outcome of an election — can circulate. One takes effect immediately and effectively bans people or groups from knowingly sharing certain deceptive election-related deepfakes. It is enforceable for 120 days before an election, similar to laws in other states, but goes further by remaining enforceable for 60 days after — a sign that lawmakers are concerned about misinformation spreading as votes are being tabulated.

The Dating-App Diversity Paradox via The Atlantic 👨🏻‍❤️‍👩🏾📲

Dating people your friends or family know usually means dating people demographically similar to you—and that can lead to an ever more segregated society. “How couples meet ends up being this incredibly primary battlefield to the reinforcement of a distinction of racial, ethnic, and social class groups,” Reuben Thomas, a sociologist at the University of New Mexico, told me. As isolating as apps can be, they are “a huge threat to those boundaries.” They might link you to someone you otherwise never would have met—and allow the two of you to establish your own relationship norms, free from outside judgment. Pair by pair, they could create a more integrated and equitable world.

The Historical Precedents to Trump’s Attacks on Haitian Immigrants 🐶 🐈

The idea of immigrants as being unassimilable or even dangerous to American cultural norms goes back a very long time. We can look back and see people being demonized for eating different foods. There’s a substantial body of work on immigrant children being teased over what they bring to school for lunch—for instance, smells, tastes, and visuals—that people aren’t used to, and how that shows some kind of inexorable difference. But I think the thing that’s interesting here is that the kind of “They’re not like us” discourse is colliding with a demonizing discourse, which is, to my mind, a level up. So I’m thinking more of the language that holds that an entire immigrant population is unclean, unhealthy, or dangerous, or how we often see immigrant populations described as a flood, a surge, or a plague. Scholars have found that these kinds of linguistic markers correspond with real violence against immigrant communities. And that’s been true all the way through the twentieth century.

Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body via Wired 🦾

What I came to believe Larry was saying was that nothing really mattered unless we ultimately demonstrated that robots could learn to perform end-to-end tasks. Only then would we have a real shot at making robots reliably perform these tasks in the messy and unpredictable real world, qualifying us to be a moonshot. It wasn’t about the specific number 17, but about the fact that big breakthroughs require small teams, not armies of engineers.

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