Google can expect a big rest-of-world trust problem when it rolls out Google Glass overseas, because of: foreign fallout from Edward Snowden’s illegal disclosures of NSA surveillance activities; Google’s reputation for aggressive and pervasive spying on people’s privacy; and Google’s cavalier legal stance that people have “no legitimate expectation of privacy.”
Please find the new Precursor online Research Library -- here -- which will be kept up-to-date going forward.
This should make it much easier to scan and find particular research of interest by subject and theme.
Thank you.
Anyone interested in Google Glass should not miss CNET Molly Wood's "Google Glass Rant."
In a short and very entertaining ~2 min video, she explains, and acts out, why she believes: "Google Glass is a new frontier in human rudeness, inattention, and danger." And she concludes that "the world is not ready for Google Glass."
Simply, she understands that the real problems with Google Glass are not so much problems for the actual users of Google Glass, but for other people who happen to find themselves in proximity of glass users.
September 9th looks to be a challenging day for the FCC.
For many good reasons, the FCC will face a skeptical D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel Monday in oral arguments for Verizon vs. FCC. The FCC will be defending its Open Internet order which mandated neutrality.
Overall the court will be skeptical because the FCC largely ignored the law, Congress, the facts, and the Constitution. Essentially, the FCC made up an industry problem that does not exist in order to repurpose itself for the Internet age. Simply, the FCC is not asking for slack from the court (i.e. Chevron Deference), it’s basically asking for carte blanche to grant itself unbounded authority going forward.
Verizon enjoys the advantage in this case because it need prevail in only one of its several strong challenges to the FCC’s order, while the FCC must convince the court to completely reject all of Verizon’s arguments.
Specifically, why will this court be skeptical here?
Yet again, Google has violated the first rule of holes; when in a hole, stop digging.
Google is unwisely keeping the story alive that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said this to Charlie Rose on air: [Google] “took our stuff and … that was wrong. This really bothers me. I don’t see how [Larry Page] thinks you can just copy someone else’s stuff.”
In a Google+ post to his followers, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt responded: “We typically try to avoid getting dragged into public battles with other companies. But I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Larry Ellison’s claims that Google “took [Oracle’s] stuff”. It’s simply untrue -- and that’s not just my opinion, but the judgment of a U.S. District Court.”
Does Google really want to engage in a broader public conversation about the truth and facts of Google’s serial disrespect for the property of others?
Information may want to be free, but physical networks are costly.
Few proponents of net neutrality appreciate the trillions of dollars of investment it has taken to build and upgrade the Internet’s vast and varied infrastructure that we all enjoy today. Simply, the Internet is not free of cost.
Economical policies have made the Internet universal and have enabled users to access the content, apps, and devices of their choice – what net neutrality is supposedly all about. On the other hand, uneconomical policies that discourage economic growth, return-on-investment, or respect for property can have unintended consequences and can threaten the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs.
Please click -- here for the powerpoint presentation: "The public evidence Google violated the DOJ-Google criminal non-prosecution agreement."
Summary
In August of 2011, Google admitted criminal liability for knowingly advertising for rogue pharmacies dispensing drugs without a prescription for seven years despite repeated Government warnings to stop doing so.
To settle this criminal matter in advance of a Grand Jury proceeding, Google agreed in the DOJ-Google Criminal Non-Prosecution Agreement (NPA ) to disgorge $500m in ill-gotten revenues and to obey a two-year remediation requirement designed to deter more Google criminal activity.
Net neutrality is in the eye of the beholder.
It’s rapidly devolved into a gotcha game -- where if someone doesn’t like something or someone, they cry “net neutrality violation!” and call for an FCC investigation -- under the FCC’s self-asserted, all-powerful Open Internet order.
Senators and Representatives are now writing the FCC urging it to investigate CBS.com for an alleged net neutrality violation over a contract dispute over how much Time Warner Cable pays for retransmitting CBS programming. The FCC could have a role in this retransmission dispute under obsolete 1992 law, but not legitimately under the FCC’s Open Internet order.
The fact that U.S. senators and representatives imagine that a billing dispute among companies could be considered a net neutrality violation illustrates how arbitrary and capricious net neutrality politics and the FCC’s Open Internet order have become.
Apparently there is no objective, reasonable or predictable standard of what net neutrality is or what a violation of “it” is. That net neutrality has transmogrified into a political-catch-all for anything affecting consumers is powerful proof of how capriciously this issue has been abused.
Why has net neutrality become so capricious?
Google got it right. In a filing to the FCC, Google Fiber rightly asserts that its terms-of-service do not violate the FCC’s Open Internet order and is simply reasonable network management allowed under the FCC’s rules. Mr. McClendon’s 10-24-12 net neutrality complaint is misinformed and groundless.
