What's Good for the Goose is Good for Google!

You gotta love Senator DeMint’s moxie and sense of humor in standing up to Google’s outrageous double standard on net neutrality! To try and get this young company’s attention that legislation and Washington is not child’s play -- but very serious business with real world consequences -- Senator DeMint drafted an amendment to the Stevens bill that would make it illegal (with jail time) for search engines to discriminate against content in the Internet search business. He has since said that it’s not a serious amendment, but an attempt to get Google’s attention.  

These unregulated young dotcom companies have a child-like naiveté that they are immune to Washington regulation and that they can behave in any way they want (trying to use regulation to block their competitors entry into ecommerce) -- without consequences. This amendment reminds me of how elementary schools often will take their students on field trips to visit the police station to let kids sit in a jail cell for a minute -- in order to get a safe way to “feel” what its like -- so they will never ever want to go there.

The young companies, Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon, hopefully got the message. Microsoft, with its DOJ history, obviously has not learned its lesson.

The ecommerce companies’ assertion that broadband markets are not competitive does not square with the facts or the expert findings of the FCC, DOJ and FTC. If the government does not agree with the ecommerce giants competitive and anti-trust premise, they find themselves in the precarious position of arguing why the de facto search duopoly is somehow different than broadband. And if they don’t understand how they are on a very slippery slope in their argument -- they are preparing for a serious regulatory fall in the future.