Open Internet

Apparently, Yahoo is trying to douse itself with some "Microsoft-repellant" in joining Google's OpenSocial allance and forming a non-profit OpenSocial Foundation with Google and MySpace.

While Yahoo's OpenSocial press release never mentioned Microsoft, the impetus for this change of heart by Yahoo was clearly a way to "dis" Microsoft and make Yahoo marginally less attractive to Microsoft.

Kudos to CNET's article "YouTube's expanded API not for everybody" which exposes Google's hypocrisy in  pushing for everyone else BUT Google-YouTube to have open and non-discriminatory access to their networks. (Remember: Google is leading the Open Internet Coalition to mandate net neutrality for all broadband providers; Google is leading the wireless open access push for more open wireless APIs; and Google asked the court to extend Microsoft's decree and keep their API's open.)

It is telling that Google-YouTube's API (Application Programming Interface) terms of service BLOCKS any commercial competitor seeking to generate advertising from using the API.

• This is an interesting discriminatory position for Google-YouTube which supposedly subscribes to the information commons philosophy of the Open Internet and which also happens to have the dominant share of video streaming market per ComScore (Google-YouTube has seven times the viewer share as any other video-streaming provider.)

Bottom line: What's good for Google is not good for the Gander.

• Google believes it is "special,"  and that one set of rules should apply to Google and its wholly-owned companies like YouTube, and another set of much more onerous rules should apply to all of their potential competitors.   

Professor Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality" is reportedly now advocating "law breaking" to advance the "information commons" agenda, which believes Internet infrastrructure, spectrum and content should be publicly owned and not privately owned.  

• Communications Daily quoted Professor Wu on March 11, 2008:
  • "To move things along, unlicensed users should start occupying unused spectrum for wireless broadband, Wu said: "You gotta start somewhere, and it always starts with law-breaking.""
• My experience is that Comm Daily is careful to accurately quote people and if Professor Wu did not to clarify his remarks, we can assume them to be accurate. I also have not seen a clarification of this after two more publications. 
• I would also like to extend the courtesy to Professor Wu to be able to qualify his remarks that they were meant to be flippant, or a joke, or that he really didn't mean to call to publicly encourage people to break the law.
  • He could resolve this issue with a simple blog post.  

That said, it is very troubling to any public civility minded person who believes in the rule of law and respect for property, that such a prominent person as Professor Wu (who coined the term net neutrality, and who proposed Caterfone open access rules for the 700 MHz auction) would advocate "law-breaking" to advance his political agenda.

The House Judiciary hearing on "Free Speech and the Internet" this afternoon was perilously close to being a non-event.

• While Net neutrality activists will claim and spin victory and momentum in getting a congressional hearing on the subject, anyone who listened to the hearing would have been surprised by how little actual support net neutrality got out of this hearing. 

What I found most interesting and telling at the hearing is that Michelle Combs of the Christian Coalition, who testified in support of net neutrality, was completely unable to answer simple softball questions by Ranking Member Sensenbrenner. Like a proverbial "doe in headlights" she could not answer the simplest of questions for a witness; she had to ask for help from her fellow panelists, which made it obvious that she was only a symbolic figurehead on the subject and did not understand even the most basic parts of the net neutrality issue. These were the two questions and answers paraphrased:  

Kudos to Warner Todd Huston for picking up on the outrageous free-speech double standard: "Google-YouTube Yanks Pro-Life Video, Allows Planned Parenthood Vids" that cpicked up on the Catholic News Agency's story that "American Life League video yanked by YouTube."

• The hypocritical double standard here is doubled:
  • Google censors pro-life videos, but not pro-choice videos containing some of the exact same material, with no explanation or justification of this blatant content discrimination based on political views; and
  • Google's advocacy groups make a scene whenever an ISP is alleged to have violated free speech but they go underground and hide when their primary corporate patron and advocacy ally Google is alleged to have violated free speech.  
    • Two. Two. Two hypocrisies for the price of one!

It is the height of irony and hypocrisy that the House Judiciary Committee is having a hearing on "Net Neutrality and free speech on the Internet" Tuesday March 11th and there hasn't been a peep of concern or outrage from all the net neutrality/freespeech proponents, the marauding pack of so-called public/Google advocates that I affectionately refer to as "Googles Poodles." 

Politicizing the Internet

Fabricating a Free Speech Threat to Justify Regulating the Internet and An“Information Commons”     American ISPs are facilitating an unprecedented explosion of free speech.

Garret Rogers of Googling Google on ZDnet has an illuminating post: "Google gives developers access to your contacts."

• While Google extols the benefits of its "open" system it is irresponsibly silent on how it allows third parties "open access" to one of users most intimate and private treasures of information -- ones private contacts.
  • Doesn't law enforcement have to get a court authorized subpoena to see this type of private information?
  • Didn't Facebook just get whacked by users and privacy advocates for sharing access to contact lists without a users explicit permission?  

This is another big evidence point of a long and continued cavalier attitude to users privacy by Google (read on if you doubt this is a pattern -- these posts have most all the relevant links to all the mainstream articles on Google's cavalier attitude to Privacy):

Moveon.org, through its FreePress/SaveTheInternet puppets, loves to extol the virtues of grass roots democracy and claim to the press that there is a spontaneous groundswell for their net neutrality views in the "netroots." BALONEY! Moveon.org is a glorified top-down email list of activists, albeit a huge 3 million activist email list -- just like direct mail political organizers before them.

To support this point, I had to share this juicy dead-on insight shared at the Politics Online conference this week, by Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej -- per Washington Internet Daily:

• "If any group was positioned to challenge the two major parties in Internet history, it was MoveOn.org, but strangely the group "didn't want to introduce its members to each other" as a social network, instead simply handing down marching orders, Rasiej said. MoveOn "at least symbolically" checks with its 3.5 million members on what issues to pursue, but it's still run by a handful of people who typically don't query the troops unless they already know the answer, Johnson said."

Remember it was Moveon.org that attacked Facebook, the hot social networking site, when Facebook spurned Google for Microsoft. See my previous post:  "Google's poodle -- Moveon.org is leading the privacy protest against Facebook -- which spurned Google..."

Save the Internet campaign director Tim Karr in Huffington Post and columnist John Dvorak in PC Magazine are making a strategic blunder in their latest posts in responding to Andy Kessler's Wall Street Journal op ed "Internet Wrecking Ball" in bringing the net neutrality discussion back to a political philosophy discussion about whether the Internet should continue be a free market or whether Government should effectively "socialize" the Internet with net neutrality economic regulation and a implementation of an "information commons" agenda. 

CNET highlights new Comscore research that shows that mobile broadband is the fastest growing type of broadband.

• One would think this hot consumer demand for "mobility" would universally be viewed as a good thing, but it isn't viewed that way by pro-regulation/net neutrality proponents.  
• They fear rapidly increasing consumer demand for mobile broadband will undermine political support and the rationale for their pro-regulation proposals to regulate and subsidize one primary stationary broadband provider.

Proponents of a new National Broadband Strategy have two huge vulnerabilities:

• A technological bias that American consumers only want fast stationary broadband speed (and not mobility too); and
• An anti-competition policy bias that the development of broadband competition over the last several years isn't working and can't work.

Those powerful policy biases against: