Congress

Google is the only major corporation publicly pressuring the FCC to require that all owners of proprietary video programming rights give away their valuable video property for free to Google and other companies online.

It is telling that to date no other major corporation has been willing to risk their brand publicly advocating for FCC-sponsored piracy to forcibly redistribute corporate wealth from Big Content to FCC-BFF-Google.

The evidence in this analysis will show that Google is the only entity in the world that has both the long-stated mission, i.e. “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and the global monopoly power and corporate functional capabilities to fully commercially exploit this FCC-sponsored piracy proposal.

“Contradiction contradiction contradiction,” rather than “competition competition competition,” would be a more accurate description of what the FCC’s apparent arbitrary AllVid set-top-box proposal produces.

Contradiction #1: FCC rules cable competitive in 2015, but not in 2016.

In June 2015, the FCC ruled “that cable operators are subject to… "Competing Provider Effective Competition”” exempting cable from regulations, but in the spring of 2016, the FCC tentatively concludes that the ancillary cable set-top-box market is not competitive warranting maximal regulation.

It’s the FCC-forcing-proprietary-video-to-be-free-to-Google stupid!

That’s a Jim Carville-esque paraphrase of the FCC’s AllVid commercial navigation device proposal to focus the mind.

The FCC spins its AllVid proposal as pro-competition in isolation when in reality the evidence will prove it profoundly anticompetitive overall.

What’s a consumer to think about what the FCC’s responsibility is for their privacy protection?

Let me try to explain to a consumer what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) arbitrarily has done, and apparently intends to do, for consumer internet privacy protection going forward.    

By way of background, for the first decade of the Internet when consumers used dial-up technology, the FCC was responsible for protecting consumers’ private network information from commercial use without their permission.

For the second decade of the Internet when consumers came to use broadband technology, the FCC ceded its dial-up-Internet privacy protection authority to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which became responsible for consumer privacy protection from unfair and deceptive practices consistently across the entire American Internet ecosystem, regardless of who interacted with consumers’ private information.

Last spring, in order to assert legal authority to enforce net neutrality to protect edge providers from potential traffic discrimination in the FCC’s Open Internet Order, the FCC incidentally clawed back some privacy authority over Internet communications -- over the FTC’s strong objections.

Thanks to Mike Wendy of Media Freedom for capturing in this ~one minute video my "crispest answer" of why the 1934 Communications Act is in desperate need of modernization by Congress.

In the next several weeks, expect the EC’s Competition Directorate to decide that Google is in fact dominant with >90% share of Internet search in Europe and that Google has abused its search dominance by biasing its own Shopping service over competitors. It also could formally charge Google for abuse of its search dominance in contractually tying Google Search and other search-driven apps like Maps, YouTube, etc. to Android to extend its search dominance to mobile search and to the operating system market where Android now owns >80% share.

In taking a most extreme and ultimately indefensible legal and PR position, that the EU antitrust case is “wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics,” Google has painted itself into a corner, PR-wise and politically, much more than many appreciate. Why?

While the PR cover story of the FCC’s AllVid proposal may be about more consumer choice and competition to reduce the cost of cable set-top boxes, don’t be fooled.

In announcing it, the FCC Chairman admits there’s already consumer choice aplenty: “American consumers enjoy unprecedented choice in how they view entertainment, news and sports programming. You can pretty much watch what you want, where you want, when you want.”

And the AllVid proposal is not about saving consumers money.

If it were, the FCC would not be shunning the obvious, best and cheapest solution of replacing the need for a set-top box entirely, by modernly and naturally transitioning them to the sector norm of easily-downloadable, cheap/free apps.

Square peg meet round hole.

The FCC is poised to try and force-fit inherently-irreconcilable, telephone closed-ecosystem privacy rules into a broadband open-system Internet. Good luck with that.

Expect the FCC to have fits trying to successfully craft workable, non-arbitrary, and legally-sustainable Title II broadband privacy rules in the year ahead.

It is a problem of the FCC’s own making.

In arbitrarily applying Title II telecommunications rules to only the ISP half of Internet communications, while politically exempting the entire edge half of Internet communications in its Open Internet order, the FCC has ensured that information that was proprietary and controllable in the closed telephone world becomes public and uncontrollable in the open Internet world.

Horses meet open barn door.

Net neutrality activists wrongly imagined that Title II was all-purpose-regulatory-authority to impose “the strongest possible” Open Internet rules they wanted, like bans on paid prioritization, zero rating or usage based pricing, despite decades of Title II and court precedents that determine many types of economic price discrimination and pricing flexibility to be just and reasonable.

Does the FCC’s concept of a “virtuous circle of innovation” mean fostering a full and true “circle of innovation,” of not only edge provider innovation, but also ISP innovations of zero-rating pricing plans that lower users’ bandwidth costs and better fund more broadband deployment?

Please consider how the FCC’s eventual treatment of the many ISP plans for zero-rating pricing innovations could impact ultimate appellate review of the FCC’s Open Internet Order.   

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Verizon v. FCC said that the FCC’s 2010 justification -- for imposing net neutrality rules via its Section 706 authority, for the purpose of promoting broadband deployment and the “virtuous circle of innovation” that fuels Internet growth -- was reasonable and justified by the evidence.  

Are several arms of the U.S. Government giving Google special treatment to enable it to secretly conduct a nationwide, two-year, test of Project Loon -- Google’s ambitious scheme to be the first company to commercialize the stratosphere -- in a manner that risks public safety, and environmental, and other harms?