Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

"Corporate crime" is an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the most consequential and profligate theft in America is #WageTheft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, *dull* that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:

https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

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The Real Crime Isn’t Shoplifting—It’s Wage Theft

Why has the media gone all in on small time scofflaws when organized financial crime is robbing people straight from their paychecks?

The New Republic

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's #ShieldOfBoringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "#WhiteCollarCrime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern.

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Pluralistic: 07 Dec 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes - even those committed by organized crime - can't hope to match:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers.

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Pluralistic: 12 Oct 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Take #NationalLaborRelationsBoard general counsel #JenniferAbruzzo's ruling in #Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a #union election, the consequence is now *automatic recognition of the union*:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages...and the union would be smashed.

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Pluralistic: NLRB rules that any union busting triggers automatic union recognition (06 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.

That's why #antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale.

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail - they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.

The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

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Opinion | Lina Khan vs. Amazon

Why Lina Khan and the F.T.C. must prevail in their long-awaited lawsuit against Amazon.

The New York Times

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

It's not just precedents in the *outcomes* of trials, either. Trial *procedure* has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is *secrecy*: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

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The [REDACTED] Case Against Amazon

You go to information war with the clickbait you have.

The American Prospect

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even *describe*. Take #ProjectNessie, the program that the #FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706

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WSJ News Exclusive | Amazon Used Secret ‘Project Nessie’ Algorithm to Raise Prices

The strategy, as described in redacted parts of FTC lawsuit, is part of agency’s case that Amazon has outsize influence on consumer prices

WSJ

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files its accusations are based on are redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon, FTC spokesman #DouglasFarrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."

It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists - or their editors - to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether.

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

This keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges who defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.

That's a tactic that serves #Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the #DOJ #AntitrustDivision, it demanded - and received - a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

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Trial Update #3 — US v Google

US v Google

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, #MeganGrey - ex-FTC, ex-#DuckDuckGo - published an editorial in #Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

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Pluralistic: Google’s enshittification memos (03 Oct 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "#SemanticMatching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads - and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.

Google forcefully disputed this claim:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297

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Google SearchLiaison on X

An opinion piece recently appeared stating that Google “just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better.” We don’t. The piece contains serious inaccuracies about how Google Search works. The organic (IE: non-sponsored) results you see in Search are…

X (formerly Twitter)

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

They contacted Gray's editors at *Wired*, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.

*Wired* removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

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A Note From WIRED Leadership

WIRED

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:

https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529

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Megan Gray on X

Google is controlling the trial w/ its secrecy designations, controlling our searches w/ its greed, and controlling Wired w/ its scare tactics. I wrote an op-ed re Google mucking around w/ organic search to make it more shopping-oriented to gin up ad $. I stand by that. My 🧵

X (formerly Twitter)

Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.

I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't.

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.

I've seen this playbook before.

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet - including my own reporting - on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

Like the corporate crimes revealed in the #PanamaPapers and #ParadisePapers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:

i. Make everything as complicated as possible;

ii. Make everything as secret as possible;

iii. Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

My next novel is #TheLostCause, a hopeful tale of the climate emergency. As with all my audiobooks, Amazon refuses to sell this one, so I made my own indie audiobook and I'm pre-selling it right now through Kickstarter:

http://lost-cause.org

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Cory Doctorow Oct 9, 2023

Image:
Jason Rosenberg (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/

CC BY
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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Japanexperterna.se (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

eof/

Justice isn't blind, she carries a big stick

Flickr

apalu Oct 9, 2023

@pluralistic hey cory, you can change your instance settings to allow single posts to be super long. some instances have no length limit. 😎