CNET's disclosure policy/judgement appears inadequate again in its latest net neutrality piece by Declan McCullagh: "Wanted: writers for DC tech lobby group, secrecy mandatory" which assails the financial motives/conflicts of other writers in excruciating detail without applying the same tough standard to themselves at CNET. 

• Readers of this blog may remember another post I wrote on this subject, where I called CNET out for not disclosing when Mr. MucCullagh wrote about Google-related issues -- that his wife works for Google.  
  • In that post, I said I was a frequent and usually appreciative reader of Mr. McCullagh's Iconoclast column, but that if CNET challenges the motives/disclosures of others, they must have clean hands of their own.
• To their credit, CNET now discloses that Mr. McCullagh's wife works for Google.

My point here is that CNET should have either had another writer who was not so conflicted write this piece or CNET should have increased the amount of disclosure on this piece to be congruent with the true thrust of the piece. 

Does Google anti-competitively leverage its dominance in search to disadvantage its competitors, including Google's media competitors? New evidence suggests yes.

• A nod of thanks must go to GoogleBlogoscoped and innovator Timo Paloheimo who invented a derivative search engine, Google Minus Google, for the clever purpose of offering "Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube."
  • Mr. Paloheimo explains that he was inspired to create Google minus Google by the New York Times important article by Miguel Helft: "Is Google a media company?"
  • This suggests that a lot of people, when they connect-the-dots of Google's dominance in search and Google's aggressive competitive forays into everyone else's business, will have a similar eureka moment that Google is anti-competitively extending its dominance in search to other market segments.

The evidence shows Google is not a neutral search engine or a neutral wholesaler of search services.

As I will show below:

FCC Commissioner McDowell recently warned bloggers at the Heritage Foundation to look out for the Net neutrality issue to become intertwined with a possible push for the return of the Fairness Doctrine. He's right to lay down that marker.  

• See a great piece by Jeff Poor of the Business and Media Institute on the subject: "FCC Commissioner: Return of Fairness Doctrine could control web content."

The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC regulation that required broadcasters to "fairly" present both sides of controversial topics -- or be subject to FCC investigations and fines.

Harvard Business School Professor Benjamin Edelman posted his earlier House antitrust testimony on why the "Google Yahoo ad deal is bad for online advertising." 

• Professor Edelman debunks Google's claim that auctions determine Google's search prices by explaining how in many cases Google actually sets the price of search through its reserve pricing policy.
• He also explains why Google is not being truthful when it claims that advertisers can easily take their data with them -- in reality Google impedes advertisers ability to use alternative advertising platforms through a technical "API" barrier to entry. 

In short, it is a useful and concise read, for those closely following the Google Yahoo deal and those trying to determine whether or not the DOJ will have problems with the proposed online advertising partnership.

• It adds to the mounting evidence that a "partnership" between a dominant #1 Google and Google's leading online advertising competitor, Yahoo, is in fact anti-competitive collusion and a de facto price fixing scheme.    

Miguel Helft/The New York Times has figured out that Google is indeed a media competitor, but apparently doesn't think other media have connected the dots -- given how they framed their lead business article today: "Is Google a Media Company?"

While its obvious that Helft/NYT get the joke that Google is most certainly a media company by the prominence, graphic, and headline of the story, they also did their journalistic duty in presenting both sides of the question, including allowing Google a lot of space to continue its charade that Google is not a media company.

Let's have some fun with Google's "who? little old us? a media company? you must be kidding..." --defense in the New York Times article.

Precursorblog will be on hiatus for vacation.

What did we learn from today's FCC action on the FreePress-Comcast dispute? 

First, there remains no need for passage of net neutrality legislation, as an FCC majority showed that there is an oversight process in place and readily available to address anyone's concerns about maintaining consumers' right to "access the lawful Internet content of their choice."  

Second, the absence of any fine against Comcast, the lack of any finding of anti-competitive intent by Comcast, and the FCC acceptance of Comcast's self-imposed deadline to address the FCC's concerns --speaks volumes. 

• Basically, the FCC is affirming the direction and actions that Comcast already has undertaken on its own, in dramatically increasing its terms-of-service disclosure and migrating to a protocol-agnostic network management technique by year end.    

Third, an enforcement process is the appropriate mechanism for determining what is "reasonable network management," not a regulatory rule or legislation.

Kudos to Cade Metz of The Register for exposing Googleopoly's new self-granted entitlement to take their customers money without permission -- called "automatic matching" in Adwords.

Tim Wu's "OPEC 2.0" Op ed in the New York Times employs an embarrassingly inane analogy/metaphor. It also happens to be a factually bankrupt piece.  

Why is Professor Wu's political analogy comparing bandwidth to energy, and a "bandwidth cartel" to OPEC -- embarrassingly inane?

• The vast majority of people understand that the price of gas has increased dramatically in part because the U.S. government has severely restricted supply by banning a variety of energy supply alternatives.
• The vast majority of people also understand that the price of bandwidth usage continues to plummet in large part because the U.S. Government has NOT restricted supply; on the contrary, it has encouraged free market competition, broadband investment and innovation that in turn -- has spurred vastly more supply of bandwidth.

In his op ed Professor Wu said:  "In an information economy, the supply and price of bandwidth matters, in the way that oil prices matter: not just for gas stations, but for the whole economy."

The Wall Street Journal's editorial writers totally get the net neutrality issue.

• Be sure to read their excellent editorial: FCC.politics.gov.

They understand net neutrality is all about:

• Regulating the Internet;
• An industrial policy pushed by high-tech rivals Google and pro-regulation groups like Moveon.org and FreePress; and
• A slippery slope towards government intervention and political mischief.

They were also dead on in understanding that no good deed goes unpunished in Washington -- i.e. the FCC majority is concluding that it is not reasonable for Comcast to deliver quality of service for most all its customers by minorly affecting the available speeds of bandwidth hogs when they congest the network. Unbelievable.

Kudos to the Wall Street Journal's strong defense of free markets and the free-market Internet.