This is the story of how Google Search died, and the peo­ple re­spon­si­ble for killing it.

The story be­gins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a prob­lem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google prop­er­ties, had called a “code yel­low” for search rev­enue due to, and I quote, “steady weak­ness in the daily num­bers” and a like­li­ness that it would end the quar­ter sig­nif­i­cantly be­hind.

For those un­fa­mil­iar with Google’s in­ter­nal sci­en­tol­ogy-es­que jar­gon, let me ex­plain. A “code yel­low” is­n’t, as you might think, a cri­sis of mod­er­ate sever­ity. The yel­low, ac­cord­ing to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not mak­ing this up — the color of a tank top that for­mer VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear dur­ing his time at the com­pany. It’s es­sen­tially the equiv­a­lent of DEFCON 1 and ac­ti­vates, as Levy ex­plained, a war room-like sit­u­a­tion where work­ers are pulled from their desks and into a con­fer­ence room where they tackle the prob­lem as a top pri­or­ity. Any other pro­jects or con­cerns are side­lined.

In emails re­leased as part of the Department of Justice’s an­titrust case against Google, Dischler laid out sev­eral con­tribut­ing fac­tors — search query growth was “significantly be­hind fore­cast,” the “timing” of rev­enue launches was sig­nif­i­cantly be­hind, and a vague worry that “several ad­ver­tiser-spe­cific and sec­tor weak­nesses” ex­isted in search.

Anyway, a few days be­fore­hand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google’s VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google’s VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, say­ing that the ads team had been con­sid­er­ing a “code yel­low” to “close the search gap [it was] see­ing,” vaguely re­fer­ring to how crit­i­cal that growth was to an un­named “company plan.” To be clear, this email was in re­sponse to Thakur stat­ing that there is “nothing” that the search team could do to op­er­ate at the fi­delity of growth that ads had de­manded.

Shashi for­warded the email to Gomes, ask­ing if there was any way to dis­cuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and de­clar­ing that there was no way he’d sign up to a “high fi­delity” busi­ness met­ric for daily ac­tive users on search. Thakur also said some­thing that I’ve been think­ing about con­stantly since I read these emails: that there was a good rea­son that Google’s founders sep­a­rated search from ads.

On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur and Gomes shared their anx­i­eties with Nick Fox, a Vice President of Search and Google Assistant, en­ter­ing a mul­ti­ple-day-long de­bate about Google’s sud­den lust for growth. The thread is a dark win­dow into the world of growth-fo­cused tech, where Thakur listed the mul­ti­ple points of dis­con­nec­tion be­tween the ads and search teams, dis­cussing how the search team was­n’t able to finely op­ti­mize en­gage­ment on Google with­out “hacking en­gage­ment,” a term that means ef­fec­tively trick­ing users into spend­ing more time on a site, and that do­ing so would lead them to “abandon work on ef­fi­cient jour­neys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big dis­con­nect be­tween what fi­nance and ads want” and what search was do­ing.

When Gomes pushed back on the mul­ti­ple re­quests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were re­spon­si­ble for search, that search was “the rev­enue en­gine of the com­pany,” and that bar­ter­ing with the ads and fi­nance teams was po­ten­tially “the new re­al­ity of their jobs.”

On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he be­lieved that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by say­ing that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was think­ing about.”

On March 22 2019, Google VP of Product Management Darshan Kantak would de­clare the end of the code yel­low. The thread mostly con­sisted of con­grat­u­la­tory emails un­til Gomes re­sponded con­grat­u­lat­ing the team, say­ing that the plans ar­chi­tected as part of the code would do well through­out the year.

Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google’s Head of Ads and the true mas­ter­mind be­hind the code yel­low, would re­spond curtly, say­ing that the cur­rent rev­enue tar­gets were ad­dressed “by heroic RPM en­gi­neer­ing” and that “core query soft­ness con­tin­ued with­out mit­i­ga­tion” — a very clunky way of say­ing that de­spite these changes, query growth was­n’t hap­pen­ing.

A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he in­tended to send to Raghavan. He led by say­ing he was “annoyed both per­son­ally and on be­half of the search team.” in a long email, he ex­plained how one might in­crease en­gage­ment with Google Search, but specif­i­cally added that they could “increase queries quite eas­ily in the short term in user neg­a­tive ways,” like turn­ing off spell cor­rec­tion, turn­ing off rank­ing im­prove­ments, or plac­ing re­fine­ments — ef­fec­tively la­bels — all over the page, adding that it was “possible that there are trade offs here be­tween dif­fer­ent kinds of user neg­a­tiv­ity caused by en­gage­ment hack­ing,” and that he was “deeply deeply un­com­fort­able with this.” He also added that this was the rea­son he did­n’t be­lieve that queries were a good met­ric to mea­sure search and that the best de­fense about the weak­ness of queries was to cre­ate “compelling user ex­pe­ri­ences that make users want to come back.”

In the March 2019 core up­date to search, which hap­pened about a week be­fore the end of the code yel­low, was ex­pected to be “one of the largest up­dates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the up­date mostly rolled back changes, and traf­fic was in­creas­ing to sites that had pre­vi­ously been sup­pressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” up­date from 2012 that specif­i­cally tar­geted spammy search re­sults, as well as those hit by an up­date from an August 1, 2018, a few months af­ter Gomes be­came Head of Search.

While I’m guess­ing, the tim­ing of the March 2019 core up­date, along with the traf­fic in­creases to pre­vi­ously-sup­pressed sites, heav­ily sug­gests that Google’s re­sponse to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to main­tain the qual­ity of search re­sults.

A few months later in May 2019, Google would roll out a re­design of how ads are shown on the plat­form on Google’s mo­bile search, re­plac­ing the bright green “ad” la­bel and URL color on ads with a tiny lit­tle bolded black note that said “ad,” with the link look­ing oth­er­wise iden­ti­cal to a reg­u­lar search link. I guess that’s how it started hit­ting their num­bers fol­low­ing the code yel­low.

In January 2020, Google would bring this change to the desk­top, which The Verge’s Jon Porter would sug­gest made “Google’s ads look just like search re­sults now.”

Five months later, a lit­tle over a year af­ter the Code Yellow de­ba­cle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler tak­ing his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of build­ing Google Search, Gomes would be rel­e­gated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a crit­i­cal part of the orig­i­nal team that made Google Search work, who has been cred­ited with es­tab­lish­ing the cul­ture of the world’s largest and most im­por­tant search en­gine, was chased out by a growth-hun­gry man­age­r­ial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a man­age­ment con­sul­tant wear­ing an en­gi­neer cos­tume.

A quick note: I used “management con­sul­tant” there as a pe­jo­ra­tive. While he ex­hibits all the same bean-count­ing, morally-un­guided be­hav­iors of a man­age­ment con­sul­tant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never ac­tu­ally worked in that par­tic­u­lar sec­tor of the econ­omy.

But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who pre­vi­ously worked at McKinsey — ar­guably the most morally ab­hor­rent com­pany that has ever ex­isted, hav­ing played roles both in the 2008 fi­nan­cial cri­sis (where it en­cour­aged banks to load up on debt and flawed mort­gage-backed se­cu­ri­ties) and the on­go­ing opi­oid cri­sis, where it ef­fec­tively ad­vised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. McKinsey has paid nearly $1bn over sev­eral set­tle­ments due to its work with Purdue. I’m get­ting side­tracked, but one last point. McKinsey is ac­tively anti-la­bor. When a com­pany brings in a McKinsey con­sul­tant, they’re of­ten there to ad­vise on how to “cut costs,” which in­evitably means lay­offs and out­sourc­ing. McKinsey is to the mid­dle class what flesh-eat­ing bac­te­ria is to healthy tis­sue.

These emails are a stark ex­am­ple of the mon­strous growth-at-all-costs mind­set that dom­i­nates the tech ecosys­tem, and if you take one thing away from this newslet­ter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an un­der­stand­ing that there are peo­ple re­spon­si­ble for the cur­rent state of tech­nol­ogy.

These emails — which I en­cour­age you to look up — tell a dra­matic story about how Google’s fi­nance and ad­ver­tis­ing teams, led by Raghavan with the bless­ing of CEO Sundar Pichai, ac­tively worked to make Google worse to make the com­pany more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the il­log­i­cal, prod­uct-de­stroy­ing mind­set that turns the prod­ucts you love into tor­tur­ous, frus­trat­ing quasi-tools that re­quire you to fight the com­pa­ny’s in­ten­tions to get the ser­vice you want.

Ben Gomes is a hero. He was in­stru­men­tal in mak­ing search work, both as a prod­uct and a busi­ness, join­ing the com­pany in 1999 — a time long be­fore Google es­tab­lished dom­i­nance in the field, and the same year when Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the com­pany to Excite for $1m, only to walk away af­ter Vinod Khosla (an Excite in­vestor and the co-founder of Sun Microsystems) low­balled the pair with a $750,000 of­fer.

In an in­ter­view with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google’s chal­lenge as “taking [the PageRank al­go­rithm] from one ma­chine to a whole bunch of ma­chines, and they weren’t very good ma­chines at the time.” Despite his im­pact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the mid­dle of 2018 af­ter John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on its ma­chine learn­ing and AI strat­egy. Gomes had been de­scribed as Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate across de­part­ments.

Every sin­gle ar­ti­cle I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply in­grained in the foun­da­tion of one of the most im­por­tant tech­nolo­gies ever made, who had ded­i­cated decades to main­tain­ing a prod­uct with a — to quote Gomes him­self — “guiding light of serv­ing the user and us­ing tech­nol­ogy to do that.” And when fi­nally given the keys to the king­dom — the abil­ity to el­e­vate Google Search even fur­ther — he was rat­fucked by a se­ries of rot­ten ca­reerists try­ing to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is cur­rently de­stroy­ing search, did be­fore his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tu­mul­tuous pe­riod that ce­mented its ter­mi­nal de­cline, and ef­fec­tively saw the com­pany bow out of the search mar­ket al­to­gether. His re­spon­si­bil­i­ties? Research and de­vel­op­ment for Yahoo’s search and ads prod­ucts.

When Raghavan joined the com­pany, Yahoo held a 30.4 per­cent mar­ket share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 per­cent and had shrunk for the pre­vi­ous nine con­sec­u­tive months, and was be­ing beaten even by the newly-re­leased Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest lay­offs in its cor­po­rate his­tory, shed­ding nearly 2,000 em­ploy­ees — or 14% of its over­all work­force.

The man who de­posed Ben Gomes — some­one who worked on Google Search from the very be­gin­ning — was so shit at his job that in 2009 Yahoo ef­fec­tively threw in the towel on its own search tech­nol­ogy, in­stead choos­ing to li­cense Bing’s en­gine in a ten-year deal. If we take a long view of things, this likely pre­cip­i­tated the over­all de­cline of the com­pany, which went from be­ing worth $125bn at the peak of the Dot Com bub­ble to be­ing sold to Verizon for $4.8bn in 2017.

With search no longer a pri­or­ity — and mak­ing less money for the com­pany — Yahoo de­cided to pivot into web 2.0 and orig­i­nal con­tent, mak­ing some bets that paid off, but far, far too many that did­n’t. It spent $1.1bn on Tumblr in 2013, only for Verizon to sell it for just $3m in 2019. It bought Zimbra in 2007, os­ten­si­bly to com­pete with the new Google Apps pro­duc­tiv­ity suite, only to sell it (for a re­ported frac­tion of the orig­i­nal pur­chase price) to VMware a few years later. Yahoo was a com­pany with­out a mis­sion, pur­pose, or ob­jec­tive. Nobody — and, I’ll spec­u­late, even those lead­ing the com­pany — re­ally knew what it was, or what it did.

In an in­ter­view with ZDNet’s Dan Farber from 2005, Raghavan spoke of his in­tent to “align the com­mer­cial in­cen­tives of a bil­lion con­tent providers with so­cial good in­tent” while at Yahoo, and his ea­ger­ness to “inspire the au­di­ence to give more data. Before that, it’s hard to find out ex­actly what Raghavan did — ac­cord­ing to ZDNet, he spent “14 years do­ing search and data-min­ing re­search at IBM.”

In April 2011, the Guardian ran an in­ter­view with Raghavan that called him “Yahoo’s se­cret weapon,” de­scrib­ing his plan to make “rigorous sci­en­tific re­search and prac­tice… to in­form Yahoo’s busi­ness from email to ad­ver­tis­ing,” and how un­der then-CEO Carol Bartz, “the fo­cus has shifted to the di­rect de­vel­op­ment of new prod­ucts.” It speaks of Raghavan’s “scientific ap­proach” and his “steady, process-based logic to in­no­va­tion that is very dif­fer­ent to the com­mon per­cep­tion that ideas and de­vel­op­ment are more about luck and spon­tane­ity,” a sen­tence I am only shar­ing with you be­cause I need you to see how stu­pid it is, and how spe­cious the tech press’ ac­co­lades used to be. This en­tire ar­ti­cle is ridicu­lous, so ut­terly vac­u­ous that I’m ac­tu­ally as­ton­ished. What about Raghavan’s ca­reer made this feel right? How has no­body con­nected these dots be­fore and said some­thing? Am I in­sane?

To be clear, this was some­thing writ­ten sev­eral years af­ter Yahoo had li­censed its search en­gine to Microsoft in a fi­nan­cial deal that Marisa Mayer, who re­placed Bartz, was still an­gry about for years. Raghavan’s reign as the “search mas­ter” was one so suc­cess­ful that it ended up be­ing re­placed by a search en­gine that not a sin­gle per­son in the world en­joys say­ing out loud.

This Guardian ar­ti­cle ran ex­actly one year be­fore dra­matic lay­offs at Yahoo that in­volved fir­ing en­tire di­vi­sions-worth of peo­ple, and four months be­fore Carol Bartz would be fired by tele­phone by then-Chair­man Roy Bostock. Her re­place­ment — Scott Thompson, who pre­vi­ously served as President of PayPal — would last only five months in the role be­fore he too was re­placed by for­mer Google ex­ec­u­tive Marissa Mayer, in part be­cause it emerged he lied on his re­sume about hav­ing a Computer Science de­gree.

Bartz joined Yahoo in 2009 in the af­ter­math of its pre­vi­ous CEO Jerry Yang re­fus­ing to sell the com­pany to Microsoft for $45 bil­lion. In her first year, she laid off hun­dreds of peo­ple and struck a deal to power Yahoo’s search us­ing Microsoft’s Bing search en­gine tech, with Microsoft pay­ing Yahoo 88% of the rev­enue it gained from searches — a deal that made Yahoo a cou­ple hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars for hand­ing over the keys to its most high-traf­fic plat­form.

As I have pre­vi­ously stated, when Prabhakar Ragahavan, Yahoo’s se­cret weapon, was do­ing his work, Yahoo Search was so valu­able it was re­placed with Bing. The com­pa­ny’s sole value, in many ways, was en­tirely dri­ven by nos­tal­gia and the as­so­ci­a­tion with the days be­fore he worked there.

It’s very, very dif­fi­cult to find much on Raghavan’s his­tory — it took me hours of dig­ging through Google re­sults to find the three or four ar­ti­cles that went into any depth about him — but from what I’ve gleaned, his ex­per­tise lies pri­mar­ily in “failing up,” as­cend­ing through the ranks of tech­nol­ogy on the mo­men­tum from the ex­plo­sions he caused. In a WIRED in­ter­view from 2021, Steven Levy said Raghavan “isn’t CEO of Google— he just runs the place,” and de­scribed his ad­di­tion to the com­pany as “a move from re­search to man­age­ment.”

While Levy calls him a “world-class com­puter sci­en­tist who has au­thored de­fin­i­tive texts in the field,” he also de­scribes Raghavan as “choosing a man­age­ment track,” which def­i­nitely tracks with every­thing I’ve found about him. Raghavan proudly de­clares that “Google’s third-party ad tech plays a crit­i­cal role in keep­ing jour­nal­ism alive” at a time when he was ag­gres­sively in­cen­tiviz­ing search en­gine op­ti­mized con­tent, and a year af­ter he’d de­posed some­one who ac­tu­ally gave a shit about search.

Under Raghavan, Google has be­come less re­li­able, less trans­par­ent, and is dom­i­nated by search en­gine op­ti­mized ag­gre­ga­tors, ad­ver­tis­ing, and out­right spam.

As I’ve ar­gued pre­vi­ously, we — with good rea­son — con­tin­u­ally com­plain about the state of Twitter un­der Elon Musk, but I’d ar­gue Raghavan (and, by ex­ten­sion, Google CEO Sundar Pichai) de­serve as much crit­i­cism, if not more, for the dam­age they’ve done to so­ci­ety. Be­cause Google is the ul­ti­mate es­sen­tial piece of on­line in­fra­struc­ture, just like power lines and wa­ter mains are in the phys­i­cal realm.

Raghavan and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, a man who ded­i­cated a good por­tion of his life to mak­ing the world’s in­for­ma­tion more ac­ces­si­ble, in the process burn­ing the Library of Alexandria to the ground so that Pichai could make more than 200 mil­lion dol­lars a year.

And Raghavan — a man­ager, hired by Sundar Pichai, a for­mer McKinsey man and a man­ager by trade — is an ex­am­ple of every­thing wrong with the tech in­dus­try. Despite his his­tory as a true com­puter sci­en­tist with ac­tual aca­d­e­mic cre­den­tials, Raghavan chose to bull­doze ac­tual work­ers and re­place them with toad­ies that would make Google more prof­itable and less use­ful to the world at large.

Since Prabhakar took the reins in 2020, Google Search has dra­mat­i­cally de­clined, with the nu­mer­ous “core” search up­dates al­legedly made to im­prove the qual­ity of re­sults hav­ing an ad­verse ef­fect, in­creas­ing the preva­lence of spammy, search en­gine op­ti­mized con­tent.

It’s be­cause the peo­ple run­ning the tech in­dus­try are no longer those that built it. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fi­asco), and while they re­main as con­trol­ling share­hold­ers, they clearly don’t give a shit about what “Google” means any­more. Prabhakar Raghavan is a man­ager, and his ca­reer, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of “did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo any­thing of note, and fucked up Google so badly that every news out­let has run a story about how bad it is.”

This is the re­sult of tak­ing tech­nol­ogy out of the hands of real builders and hand­ing it to man­agers at a time when “management” is syn­ony­mous with “staying as far away from ac­tual work as pos­si­ble.” And when you’re a do-noth­ing look­ing to profit as much as pos­si­ble, you only care about growth. You’re not a user, you’re a par­a­site, and it’s these par­a­sites that have dom­i­nated and are drain­ing the tech in­dus­try of its value.

Raghavan’s story is unique, in­so­far as the dam­age he’s man­aged to in­flict (or, if we’re be­ing ex­cep­tion­ally char­i­ta­ble, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo) on two in­dus­try-defin­ing com­pa­nies, and the fact that he did it with­out be­ing a CEO or founder. Per­haps more re­mark­able, he’s achieved this while main­tain­ing a cer­tain de­gree of anonymity. Everyone knows who Musk and Zuckerberg are, but Raghavan’s known only in his cor­ner of the Internet. Or at least he was.

Now Raghavan has told those work­ing on search that their “new op­er­at­ing re­al­ity” is one with less re­sources and less time to de­liver things. Rot Master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a prod­uct he beat to death with his bare hands.

Raghavan is a hall-of-fame rot econ­o­mist, and one of the many man­age­r­ial types that have caused im­mea­sur­able dam­age to the Internet in the name of growth and “shareholder value.” And I be­lieve these uber-man­agers - these ul­tra-pen­cil-push­ers and growth-hounds - are the forces de­stroy­ing tech’s abil­ity to in­no­vate.

And in my next newslet­ter, I’m go­ing to walk you through how a very spe­cific kind of man­age­r­ial mind­set has poi­soned Silicon Valley, mak­ing ca­reer fail­ures un­fath­omably rich while your fa­vorite tech prod­ucts de­cay.

Today, the Federal Trade Commission is­sued a fi­nal rule to pro­mote com­pe­ti­tion by ban­ning non­com­petes na­tion­wide, pro­tect­ing the fun­da­men­tal free­dom of work­ers to change jobs, in­creas­ing in­no­va­tion, and fos­ter­ing new busi­ness for­ma­tion.

“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, sup­press new ideas, and rob the American econ­omy of dy­namism, in­clud­ing from the more than 8,500 new star­tups that would be cre­ated a year once non­com­petes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s fi­nal rule to ban non­com­petes will en­sure Americans have the free­dom to pur­sue a new job, start a new busi­ness, or bring a new idea to mar­ket.”

The FTC es­ti­mates that the fi­nal rule ban­ning non­com­petes will lead to new busi­ness for­ma­tion grow­ing by 2.7% per year, re­sult­ing in more than 8,500 ad­di­tional new busi­nesses cre­ated each year. The fi­nal rule is ex­pected to re­sult in higher earn­ings for work­ers, with es­ti­mated earn­ings in­creas­ing for the av­er­age worker by an ad­di­tional $524 per year, and it is ex­pected to lower health care costs by up to $194 bil­lion over the next decade. In ad­di­tion, the fi­nal rule is ex­pected to help drive in­no­va­tion, lead­ing to an es­ti­mated av­er­age in­crease of 17,000 to 29,000 more patents each year for the next 10 years un­der the fi­nal rule.

Noncompetes are a wide­spread and of­ten ex­ploita­tive prac­tice im­pos­ing con­trac­tual con­di­tions that pre­vent work­ers from tak­ing a new job or start­ing a new busi­ness. Noncompetes of­ten force work­ers to ei­ther stay in a job they want to leave or bear other sig­nif­i­cant harms and costs, such as be­ing forced to switch to a lower-pay­ing field, be­ing forced to re­lo­cate, be­ing forced to leave the work­force al­to­gether, or be­ing forced to de­fend against ex­pen­sive lit­i­ga­tion. An es­ti­mated 30 mil­lion work­ers—nearly one in five Americans—are sub­ject to a non­com­pete.

Under the FTC’s new rule, ex­ist­ing non­com­petes for the vast ma­jor­ity of work­ers will no longer be en­force­able af­ter the rule’s ef­fec­tive date. Ex­ist­ing non­com­petes for se­nior ex­ec­u­tives - who rep­re­sent less than 0.75% of work­ers - can re­main in force un­der the FTC’s fi­nal rule, but em­ploy­ers are banned from en­ter­ing into or at­tempt­ing to en­force any new non­com­petes, even if they in­volve se­nior ex­ec­u­tives. Em­ploy­ers will be re­quired to pro­vide no­tice to work­ers other than se­nior ex­ec­u­tives who are bound by an ex­ist­ing non­com­pete that they will not be en­forc­ing any non­com­petes against them.

In January 2023, the FTC is­sued a pro­posed rule which was sub­ject to a 90-day pub­lic com­ment pe­riod. The FTC re­ceived more than 26,000 com­ments on the pro­posed rule, with over 25,000 com­ments in sup­port of the FTC’s pro­posed ban on non­com­petes. The com­ments in­formed the FTC’s fi­nal rule­mak­ing process, with the FTC care­fully re­view­ing each com­ment and mak­ing changes to the pro­posed rule in re­sponse to the pub­lic’s feed­back.

In the fi­nal rule, the Commission has de­ter­mined that it is an un­fair method of com­pe­ti­tion, and there­fore a vi­o­la­tion of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for em­ploy­ers to en­ter into non­com­petes with work­ers and to en­force cer­tain non­com­petes.

The Commission found that non­com­petes tend to neg­a­tively af­fect com­pet­i­tive con­di­tions in la­bor mar­kets by in­hibit­ing ef­fi­cient match­ing be­tween work­ers and em­ploy­ers. The Commission also found that non­com­petes tend to neg­a­tively af­fect com­pet­i­tive con­di­tions in prod­uct and ser­vice mar­kets, in­hibit­ing new busi­ness for­ma­tion and in­no­va­tion. There is also ev­i­dence that non­com­petes lead to in­creased mar­ket con­cen­tra­tion and higher prices for con­sumers.

The Commission found that em­ploy­ers have sev­eral al­ter­na­tives to non­com­petes that still en­able firms to pro­tect their in­vest­ments with­out hav­ing to en­force a non­com­pete.

Trade se­cret laws and non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments (NDAs) both pro­vide em­ploy­ers with well-es­tab­lished means to pro­tect pro­pri­etary and other sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion. Researchers es­ti­mate that over 95% of work­ers with a non­com­pete al­ready have an NDA.

The Commission also finds that in­stead of us­ing non­com­petes to lock in work­ers, em­ploy­ers that wish to re­tain em­ploy­ees can com­pete on the mer­its for the work­er’s la­bor ser­vices by im­prov­ing wages and work­ing con­di­tions.

Under the fi­nal rule, ex­ist­ing non­com­petes for se­nior ex­ec­u­tives can re­main in force. Employers, how­ever, are pro­hib­ited from en­ter­ing into or en­forc­ing new non­com­petes with se­nior ex­ec­u­tives. The fi­nal rule de­fines se­nior ex­ec­u­tives as work­ers earn­ing more than $151,164 an­nu­ally and who are in pol­icy-mak­ing po­si­tions.

Additionally, the Commission has elim­i­nated a pro­vi­sion in the pro­posed rule that would have re­quired em­ploy­ers to legally mod­ify ex­ist­ing non­com­petes by for­mally re­scind­ing them. That change will help to stream­line com­pli­ance.

Instead, un­der the fi­nal rule, em­ploy­ers will sim­ply have to pro­vide no­tice to work­ers bound to an ex­ist­ing non­com­pete that the non­com­pete agree­ment will not be en­forced against them in the fu­ture. To aid em­ploy­ers’ com­pli­ance with this re­quire­ment, the Commission has in­cluded model lan­guage in the fi­nal rule that em­ploy­ers can use to com­mu­ni­cate to work­ers.

The Commission vote to ap­prove the is­suance of the fi­nal rule was 3-2 with Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew N. Ferguson vot­ing no. Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Alvaro Bedoya, Melissa Holyoak and Andrew N. Ferguson each is­sued sep­a­rate state­ments. Chair Lina M. Khan will is­sue a sep­a­rate state­ment.

The final rule will be­come ef­fec­tive 120 days af­ter pub­li­ca­tion in the Federal Register.

Once the rule is ef­fec­tive, mar­ket par­tic­i­pants can re­port in­for­ma­tion about a sus­pected vi­o­la­tion of the rule to the Bureau of Competition by email­ing non­com­pete@ftc.gov.

Need to em­bed a YouTube video in your GitHub README? Use our easy-to-use tool to gen­er­ate a mark­down snip­pet in­stantly.

Daniel Dennett, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of phi­los­o­phy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in phi­los­o­phy of mind and a wide range of other philo­soph­i­cal ar­eas, has died.

Professor Dennett wrote ex­ten­sively about is­sues re­lated to phi­los­o­phy of mind and cog­ni­tive sci­ence, es­pe­cially con­scious­ness. He is also rec­og­nized as hav­ing made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the con­cept of in­ten­tion­al­ity and de­bates on free will. Some of Professor Dennett’s books in­clude Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Breaking the Spell (2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). He pub­lished a mem­oir last year en­ti­tled I’ve Been Thinking. There are also sev­eral books about him and his ideas. You can learn more about his work here.

Professor Dennett held a po­si­tion at Tufts University for nearly all his ca­reer. Prior to this, he held a po­si­tion at the University of California, Irvine from 1965 to 1971. He also held vis­it­ing po­si­tions at Oxford, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and other in­sti­tu­tions dur­ing his time at Tufts University. Professor Dennett was awarded his PhD from the University of Oxford in 1965 and his un­der­grad­u­ate de­gree in phi­los­o­phy from Harvard University in 1963.

Professor Dennett is the re­cip­i­ent of sev­eral awards and prizes in­clud­ing the Jean Nicod Prize, the Mind and Brain Prize, and the Erasmus Prize. He also held a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. An out­spo­ken athe­ist, Professor Dennett was dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”. He was also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, an hon­ored Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Organization.

He died this morn­ing from com­pli­ca­tions of in­ter­sti­tial lung dis­ease.*

The fol­low­ing in­ter­view with Professor Dennett was recorded last year:

Related: “Philosophers: Stop Being Self-Indulgent and Start Being Like Daniel Dennett, says Daniel Dennett“. (Other DN posts on Dennett can be found here.)

*This was added af­ter the ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion of the post. Source: New York Times.

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the goal of a book is­n’t to get to the last page, it’s to ex­pand your think­ing.

I have to con­stantly re­mind my­self of this. Especially in an en­vi­ron­ment that pri­or­i­tizes op­ti­miz­ing and max­i­miz­ing per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity, where it seems if you can’t mea­sure (let alone re­mem­ber) the im­pact of a book in your life then it was­n’t worth read­ing.

I don’t be­lieve that, but I never quite had the words for ex­press­ing why I don’t be­lieve that. Dave’s ar­tic­u­la­tion hit pretty close.

Then a cou­ple days later my wife sent me this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I can­not re­mem­ber the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Damn, great writ­ers are sO gOOd wITh wORdz, amirite?

Emerson ar­tic­u­lates with acute brevity some­thing I could­n’t suss out in my own thoughts, let alone put into words. It makes me jeal­ous.

Anyhow, I wanted to write this down to re­in­force re­mem­ber­ing it.

And in a sim­i­lar vein for the on­line world: I can­not re­mem­ber the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.

It’s a good re­minder to be mind­ful of my con­tent diet — you are what you read, even if you don’t al­ways re­mem­ber it.

@ha­las@mastodon.so­cial shared this story in re­sponse, which I re­ally liked:

At the uni­ver­sity I had a pro­fes­sor who had a class with us in the first year and then in the sec­ond. At the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond year’s classes he asked us some­thing from the ma­te­r­ial of pre­vi­ous year. When met with si­lence he nod­ded thought­fully and said: “Education is some­thing you have even if you don’t re­mem­ber any­thing”

I love sto­ries that stick with peo­ple like that, e.g. “something a teacher told me once…”

For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 space­craft is re­turn­ing us­able data about the health and sta­tus of its on­board en­gi­neer­ing sys­tems. The next step is to en­able the space­craft to be­gin re­turn­ing sci­ence data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only space­craft to ever fly in in­ter­stel­lar space (the space be­tween stars).

Voyager 1 stopped send­ing read­able sci­ence and en­gi­neer­ing data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mis­sion con­trollers could tell the space­craft was still re­ceiv­ing their com­mands and oth­er­wise op­er­at­ing nor­mally. In March, the Voyager en­gi­neer­ing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California con­firmed that the is­sue was tied to one of the space­craft’s three on­board com­put­ers, called the flight data sub­sys­tem (FDS). The FDS is re­spon­si­ble for pack­ag­ing the sci­ence and en­gi­neer­ing data be­fore it’s sent to Earth.

The team dis­cov­ered that a sin­gle chip re­spon­si­ble for stor­ing a por­tion of the FDS mem­ory — in­clud­ing some of the FDS com­put­er’s soft­ware code — is­n’t work­ing. The loss of that code ren­dered the sci­ence and en­gi­neer­ing data un­us­able. Unable to re­pair the chip, the team de­cided to place the af­fected code else­where in the FDS mem­ory. But no sin­gle lo­ca­tion is large enough to hold the sec­tion of code in its en­tirety.

So they de­vised a plan to di­vide the af­fected code into sec­tions and store those sec­tions in dif­fer­ent places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to ad­just those code sec­tions to en­sure, for ex­am­ple, that they all still func­tion as a whole. Any ref­er­ences to the lo­ca­tion of that code in other parts of the FDS mem­ory needed to be up­dated as well.

The team started by sin­gling out the code re­spon­si­ble for pack­ag­ing the space­craft’s en­gi­neer­ing data. They sent it to its new lo­ca­tion in the FDS mem­ory on April 18. A ra­dio sig­nal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 bil­lion miles (24 bil­lion kilo­me­ters) from Earth, and an­other 22 ½ hours for a sig­nal to come back to Earth. When the mis­sion flight team heard back from the space­craft on April 20, they saw that the mod­i­fi­ca­tion worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and sta­tus of the space­craft.

During the com­ing weeks, the team will re­lo­cate and ad­just the other af­fected por­tions of the FDS soft­ware. These in­clude the por­tions that will start re­turn­ing sci­ence data.

Voyager 2 con­tin­ues to op­er­ate nor­mally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager space­craft are the longest-run­ning and most dis­tant space­craft in his­tory. Before the start of their in­ter­stel­lar ex­plo­ration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.