Why protect the Webopolies with net neutrality corporate welfare?

The New York Times reported a very telling statistic today on one of the prominent Webopolies in the Open Internet Coalition -- eBay.

• "EBay is still far and away the biggest auction site on the market, commanding 95% of auction listings, according to Jupiter Research, an Internet consultancy." (New York Times 6-18-07  "EBay moves to Recharge its Auctions." )

95% market share! If that's not a Webopoly, what is?

What rankles me is that companies like eBay, with clear monopoly shares like 95% of online auction listings, and Google, which has 65% share of search and rapidly rising in the US, 75% share in Europe and 90% share in Germany, have the gall to continue to harp on a "telecom and cable duopoly" and to sanctimoniously claim to be looking out for "competition."

• One of my primary beefs with the Open Internet Coalition crowd over the last year has been their unbelievably hypocritical double standard when it comes to competition.
• They believe in competition for everyone else but themselves!
• And they go so far as to want Congress to pass a net neutrality law which is nothing more than a special interest corporate welfare scheme, where webopolies are protected permanently from broadband competition and paying their fair share of the cost of the Internet for their massive Internet traffic use. 

I also am saddened that many honorable consumer groups and public interest groups have sullied themselves by carrying Google, eBay and Amazon's dirty water for them.

• Maybe it will be the webopolies' systematic invasion of consumers' privacy that will awaken these folks from their "public interest" slumber on this critically important issue for consumers.
• Maybe these public interest groups will take a moment to examine the EPIC filing to the FTC on the Google-DoubleClick merger which would create the largest database of private and intimate information, on more people than any entity has ever collected in the history of the world.
• That consumer and public interest threat is too obvious and "relevant" to be focused on by the Open Internet public interest groups.
• I guess a problem has to be partisan, stale and backward-looking, like net neutrality, for these Open Internet public interest groups to notice...
• Oh but I forgot, these increasingly partisan public interest groups are convinced that these pro net neutrality companies are "their" webopolies, their good guy political buddies, because they lavish their organizations with special "donations."
• I predict that the "public interest" groups that are playing the role of "human shield" for the webopolies, will regret their extreme webopoly fealty in the long term.