Google is so arrogant it isn't even aware it is being arrogant.

Per a San Francisco Chronicle article:

• "Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. will start a high-profile advertising partnership by early October, even if federal regulators haven't yet approved the deal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Thursday.
• "We are going to move forward with it," Schmidt said in an interview on Bloomberg television after being asked whether the companies would wait for the Justice Department to complete its review."

Let's put this Google behavior into a little context.

DOJ antirust prosecutors are currently involved in a serious antitrust investigation of the Google-Yahoo online advertising partnership for potential Sherman Act collusion/price-fixing illegality.

• By declaring that Google is going ahead with the Yahoo partnership, with or without approval of the DOJ -- Google is not so subtly telling the DOJ -- "we'll see you in court," "try stopping us, if you can." 
• What words come to mind to describe Google's public behavior and effective declaration of legal war by their CEO?
  • Arrogant? insolent? disrespectful? defiant? impolitic? inflamatory? tactless? imprudent? unwise? or just downright dumb?   

Bottom line: Normal companies, who respect the rule of law and law enforcement authorities, understand the old adage that "if you want honey, don't kick the beehive."

• But Google is not normal, its special -- it has a "don't-be-evil motto" "get out of jail free card." No jail is big enough to hold Google! 

Let me leave you with this analogy:

Most everyone has missed the net neutrality and broader competitive significance of Google launching it's own browser -- Chrome -- by myopicly viewing it only through the browser competition lens vis-a-vis Microsoft Explorer.

Goals and motives matter. Listen to how Google describes its goal with Chrome: 

• "The goal was to make people forget they are using a browser," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management at Google.

What that means is that Google's goal here is to effectively and increasingly replace the neutral browser bar with Google's search advertising bar over time.

What that also means is that rather than typing a URL into a neutral browser bar that neutrally takes the user directly to the site that the user requested... Google will increasingly default the user of the browser bar to a Google page of search results with Google ads and Google's favored content.

Google has launched a big new charm offensive at ad agencies, and they are understandably suspicious -- like any fly would be looking at Google's dominant advertising web.

The New York Times has an excellent and humorous article on just how wary ad agencies are of Google -- "Googling in Person to Make Friends."

• Reporter Stephanie Clifford concluded her opening paragraph with a precious and comical capture of the real "spider and the fly" dynamic at work here...
  • The Googlers "emphasized a single message: Google is a friend to ad agencies.
  • No, really."

Let me use Google's new translation software to translate the 'Googlish' language used in this fun article into english.

""We understand that maybe we haven't been the best partner over the years" said Erin Clift, the director of agency relations at Google."

FreePress is in utopian fantasyland in objecting to Comcast's new bandwidth-usage caps -- charging Comcast is profiting from "artificial scarcity" from a lack of broadband competition.

• Artificial Scarcity!
• Internet bandwidth is not infinite -- despite FreePress' utopian fantasy that bandwidth somehow should be infinite in FreePress' perfect world.
  • Any reasonable person understands Internet and broadband networks can not have infinite bandwidth and are not free.
  • Like any infrastructure, Internet/broadband networks are expensive to build and operate, and also require a constant investment of billions of dollars to keep pace with exploding demand.

FreePress is making another big strategic mistake in screaming "artificial scarcity!" in a crowded and congested Internet.

Don't miss the excellent Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal European Edition strongly criticizing net neutrality -- "Stuck in Neutral."

• It's helpful to hear the voice of reason from thoughtful europeans who oppose the typical EU reflex for Government intervention.     

Here we go again. The AP (Advocacy Press?) is focusing on its latest perceived Internet crime against humanity -- bandwidth usage caps -- while FreePress is busy megaphoning the AP story to the rest of the media they think needs reforming.  

• Free Press' Media Reform Daily service highlighted the AP story: "Internet provider's usage cap raises questions" by Peter Svenson, the AP technology writer who carried FreePress' water in launching the investigation of Comcast's network management of p2p.

This signals that the neutralism movement is taking aim at opposing any ISP effort to use free-market-based mechanisms to address network congestion issues or bandwidth hogs' effect on the quality of service of others.

• It appears that they believe net neutrality means not only means freedom to access the content or applications of their choice, but also means unlimited usage subsidized by others. 

It will be interesting how FreePress plays this issue given that the FCC has already signalled in its recent Comcast order that usage caps are a legitimate network management tool/approach for ISPs to take in addressing network congestion and quality of service. 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the FCC's order on Comcast's network management practices, reined in the net neutrality movement much more than it advanced their agenda.

• The old adage is true here, be careful what you ask for -- FreePress/Public Knowledge. 

At its rawest level, the chest-beating petitioners got the FCC to: reiterate what the FCC has long said it would do, and also order Comcast to do what Comcast already publicly committed to do.

• When the dust settles and the rhetoric cools, the petitioners will better understand the old adage: be careful what you ask for.
• In this instance, they hoped to advance their agenda for sweeping net neutrality legislation and regulation, and what they ended up with was the expert agency taking much of the wind out of their sails. 

How does the FCC Comcast decision limit Net Neutrality?

First, the petition proved the existing system/process works -- seriously undermining any legitimate rationale for new net neutrality legislation or regulation. (Unfortunately, for the neutralists, the public takeaway from the resolution of this petition was not that legislation is needed, but that there is a government process in place more than able to handle consumers' concerns.)  

Kudos to David Smith of the Gaurdian Observer for his outstanding piece on Google as it turns ten years old.

• Its a must read for anyone interested in Google or the future of the Internet. 

Some of my favorite insights from the piece are highlighted below:  

Does Google inherently favor its Google-owned applications over competitors in search results? The more one looks, the more it looks that way.

Saturday's New York Times article: "Some Media companies choose to profit from pirated YouTube clips" -- got me thinking about the anti-competitive nature of Google's increasing dominance of the process of locating copyrighted content online.

GoogleBlogoscoped has flagged additional evidence that Google anti-competitively favors its own content over competitors in a good post: "Google allows itself a special ad."

• This complements my post earlier this week: "New evidence of Google search bias -- Its relevant to DOJ investigation of Google-Yahoo ad-deal."

The case builds...

Bottom line: How the DOJ ultimately rules on the Google-Yahoo ad partnership will tell us a lot about how much of the future online content economy Google will be allowed to de facto control.