You are here May 2011
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2011-05-19 11:07
The widely reported DOJ criminal investigation into Google for promoting illegal pharmacy sales may be Google's most serious clash with Federal law enforcement to date; (even compared to Google's many previous run-ins with law enforcement chronicled in my recent Forbes op-ed.)
Why is this case is so serious?
First, this is a bonafide criminal probe involving Google promoting illegal drug sales, which could have put hundreds of thousands of U.S. consumers at serious risk of injury or death from counterfeit, harmful, or inappropriate-use drugs.
- This case involves more than fraudulent business behavior, it appears to involve criminal disregard for the health and safety of consumers for monetary gain.
Second, if reports are correct that this case also involved an official Google business decision in 2004 that Google, unlike other online advertisers, would continue to promote Canadian pharmacies that they and others knew sold drugs illegally to U.S. customers, then Google may have made a deliberate business decision to disregard the law.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2011-05-23 09:24
The FCC's latest arbitrary and capricious torturing of the facts, law, and common sense, in its most recent 706 report, makes it obvious that the FCC is "in search of relevance" and highly insecure about its authority and role in the broadband competition era.
- Apparently, the FCC now sees competition-driven consumer benefits as a threat to the FCC's relevance, role and authority.
- If the bipartisan policy/law of promoting competition succeeds, then the FCC by definition has less and less to do.
- It is becoming increasingly apparent that many at the FCC don't want competition policy to succeed, because they vainly believe that the FCC can, and should, mandate social outcomes "better" than market forces and consumer choice can produce via competition.
Thus the pro-regulation forces at the FCC are increasingly and proactively seeking to discredit competition policy wherever possible by ignoring and torturing any facts, evidence, logic and common sense that do not forward their government-centric-view that "expert" FCC regulators invariably know best.
Consider the common thread between:
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2011-05-24 10:43
My new Huffington Post op-ed: Big Brother Inc., tells the story of how Google has become a more intrusive and effective "Big Brother" than even George Orwell imagined in "Nineteen Eighty-Four."
- My Huff Post Tech post on the world's #1 blog shows how Google's 24-7-365 omni-tracking enables Google to know what you want, think, believe, say, read, write, watch, and intend to do.
Google's serial disrespect of privacy is a central theme of my new book: "Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc."
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2011-05-26 09:51
The FCC's Open Internet Order is even more likely to be overturned in court than before because the FCC's extraordinary delay in publishing its December net neutrality regulations has oddly moved the FCC's April Data Roaming Order to the front of the line of cases challenging the FCC's overall legal authority to regulate broadband.
- (The April 7 Data Roaming Order was published in the Federal Register 29 days after the decision; the December 21 Open Internet Order may not be published until late summer or fall, 7-9 months after the decision, per Politico's Morning Tech.)
Consequently both cases are now more likely to be heard in the FCC-unfriendly D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2011-05-26 18:19
FreePress' radical anti-business, anti-capitalism politics lead it to make up or contort facts and analogies in order to promote its world view of a publicly-owned and regulated Internet commons.
In FreePress' latest opposition to the AT&T-T-Mobile merger, FreePress continues to nonsensically analogize this merger with the Ma Bell monopoly.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2011-05-31 18:32
In order to justify broadband price regulation in the Open Internet and Data Roaming orders, the FCC and FreePress must continue to undermine Congress' competition policy by denying the increasingly obvious and incontrovertible facts that users competitively substitute broadband services between various broadband technologies like copper networks/DSL, cable modems, fiber, WiFi/WiMax, wireless broadband, and satellite.
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