You are here February 2010
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2010-02-11 16:16
Kudos to Nicholas Carlson of Silicon Valley Insider for an outstanding must-read post on Google's new social media additions to gmail it calls Google Buzz: "WARNING: Google Buzz has a huge privacy flaw."
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2010-02-12 14:25
The FCC just signalled it is considering requiring forced access and more special access as part of its soon to be released National Broadband Plan.
- Colin Crowell, a top aide to FCC Chairman Genachowski told Bloomberg that mandating competitors lease their facilities to other competitors "has a lot of appeal as part of a national strategy" in order to help small businesses grow and aid job creation.
- Not coincidentally, Public Knowledge and five CLECs released a new study supporting this forced access approach with uneconomic analysis and selective investment and job math.
There are fatal and destructive flaws underlying this forced wholesale access and market share redistribution scheme.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2010-02-15 11:22
Google effectively blew off the DOJ's antitrust, copyright and class action objections to the amended Google Book settlement in Google's 77-page brief to the Federal Court adjudicating the settlement.
In a nutshell, Google argued that its settlement is "remarkably creative" (p 28), and "fair, reasonable and adequate" (p 67). It focused on the settlement's benefit to humanity: "the benefits of approval are bounded only by the limits of human creativity and imagination" (p 2). Google also effectively instructed the Judge to accept its redefinitions of copyright, antitrust, and class action law and to reject the DOJ's interpretation of the law and its "cramped view of the court's jurisdiction" (p 10).
The core thrust of Google's argument is political. Google essentially asks the court to make a political, not a legal, decision to:
- Disregard existing antitrust, copyright, and class action law;
- Ignore the opinion, expertise and standing of the DOJ, the United States' Chief Law Enforcement Officer;
- Effectively rewrite copyright law; and
- Permanently enthrone Google as effectively the derivative use caretaker and gatekeeper of millions of "orphan works" which Google illegally copied.
I. Google's argument is fundamentally political.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2010-02-16 10:25
Kudos to Randy May of the Free State Foundation for his outstanding CBS News op-ed "Reject the Internet 'Public Option.'"
Regulating the Internet for the first time, when there is no problem to address, and when the U.S. has developed more facilities-based broadband competition than any nation in the world, would be the tantamount to mandating the "public option" for the Internet.
The question that those pushing the Title II public option for the Internet do not want to answer is:
- What evidence is there that the FCC could do a better job building, upgrading, operating and managing the Internet than the private sector has done?
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2010-02-16 13:28
The Media and Democracy Coalition, the leading advocates for the FCC to effectively take over management of the Internet and the American broadband industry are gathering on Capitol Hill 11 am Wednesday (Rayburn 2123) to present their policy recommendations to the FCC for a "Bold Practical National Broadband Plan."
Here are some questions the panelists should be asked:
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2010-02-16 17:41
Kudos to Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity for their spot-on report of quotes from FreePress that exposes what FreePress is really all about.
Their report shows, in FreePress' own words, that they are a dystopian nightmare masquerading as a public interest group protecting freedom of the press.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2010-02-16 18:39
FCC Chairman Genachowski's speech to NARUC: "Broadband: Our Enduring Engine for Prosperity and Opportunity" raises some big open questions.
The biggest open question is whether Chairman Genachowski believes the titular "broadband engine" of his speech should remain a private sector "engine" that is private property and fueled by profit and investment returns, or whether the "broadband engine" should somehow become quasi public property, heavily regulated like a public utility, and more government funded and controlled.
Another big open question arises out of Chairman Genchowski's adoption of electricity as his new guiding metaphor in place of interstate highways.
- "Some compare high-speed Internet to building the interstate highway system in the 1950s. It’s a tempting comparison, but imperfect.
- In terms of transformative power, broadband is more akin to the advent of electricity. Both broadband and electricity are what some call “general purpose technologies” -- technologies that are a means to a great many ends, enabling innovations in a wide array of human endeavors.
- Electricity reshaped the world -- extending day into night, kicking the Industrial Revolution into overdrive, and enabling the invention of a countless number of devices and equipment that today we can’t imagine being without.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Wed, 2010-02-17 14:28
Pending FCC policy proposals in the National Broadband Plan and the Open Internet regulation proceeding would vastly expand the implicit multi-billion dollar subisidies Google already enjoys, as by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth and the smallest contributor to the Internet's cost relative to its use.
Interestingly, the FCC's largely Google-driven policy proposals effectively would:
- Promote Google's gold-plated, 1 Gigabit broadband vision for the National Broadband Plan at a time of trillion dollar Federal budget deficits;
- Recommend a substantial expansion of public subisidies for broadband that would commercially benefit Google most without requiring Google to contribute its fair share to universal broadband service; and
- Regulate the Internet for the first time in a way that would result in heavily subsidizing Google's out-of-control bandwidth usage.
I. Does Google need more subsidies?
Google is one of the most-profitable, fastest-growing, cash-rich companies in the world, with over $10b in annual free cash flow, 17% revenue growth, and ~$25b in cash on hand.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2010-02-18 12:55
The biggest takeaway from the U.S. DOJ (and the EU) approving the Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership without any restrictions is that the Varney DOJ Antitrust Division implicitly agrees with the Barnett DOJ Antitrust Division (which blocked the Google-Yahoo Ad Agreement) -- that Google is indeed an dominant and enduring search advertising monopoly.
If the DOJ did not believe Google was a monopoly, traditional antitrust analysis would have had more serious problems with the #2 and #3 competitors in a highly concentrated market combining forces.
This is a negative precursor for Google generally -- that they are indeed the next big antitrust problem of this decade.
It is also a negative precursor for the:
- FTC's antitrust review of Google-AdMob; and
- DOJ's review of the Google Book Settlement.
Google, you have a problem.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2010-02-19 11:22
Kudos to Matt Turk of Digital Society for his very insightful post spotlighting how NARUC understands the need for reasonable discrimination in the real world that the FCC apparently does not understand in its proposed Open Internet regulations.
Matt Turk: "By urging a move from non-discrimination to unreasonable discrimination, they recognize that “big dumb pipes” are a model for the Internet that was abandoned years ago. They also realize you cannot have a neutral internet if only one side of the content/access equation has to abide by those rules."
It is very important that NARUC only opposes "unreasonable discrimination."
- NARUC is closer to the real world than the FCC in understanding that there is such a thing as "reasonable" discrimination, and that despite the politically perjorative meaning of "discrimination" constantly spotlighted by net neutrality proponents, reasonable discrimination can also have many very legitimate, beneficial and worthy results that must be acknowledged, respected and even promoted.
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