DoubleClick

With the Google-DoubleClick merger reportedly in the final decision phase at the FTC, it will be interesting to learn what they ultimately conclude and if they have been monitoring recent market developments closely.  

In my Googleopoly analysis published in July, I explained in detail why the search market had already tipped to dominance and why Yahoo and Microsoft would continue to fall behind Google.

The incoming evidence continues to prove my Googleopoly analysis was dead on.

• Information Week reported that per Hitwise: Google's search market share increased in the last year from 61.84% to 65.1%, while during the same period Yahoo's share fell 1.22% and Microsoft's share fell 2.73%. 
  • To put that in perspective, in the last year alone per Hitwise, Yahoo lost 5% of its overall share while Microsoft lost a whopping 28% of its overall share. Whoa.
  • Not the kind of facts that are easy to ignore.
• Comscore has Google's share at 58.5% and also reports that Yahoo and Google are losing share. To put this in perspective again, Comscore had Google share at only 36.5% in April 2005.

There has been some reporting of Ask.com's new program "search eraser" which is a great new feature to help protect people's privacy that want it.

Two prominent Californians that matter recently did not side with home state Google on Google's pet policy crusade -- net neutrality. Awwwww. I feel bad for Google... 

Barrons reports in "Arnold drops net neutrality" that:

• "THE GOVERNATOR HAS JOINED the net neutrality debate, throwing his political heft behind incumbent phone companies."...
• "Google can't be pleased with its governor taking sides with the opposition. AT&T is based in San Antonio, Texas. Google is based in Mountain View, Calif. But Schwarzenegger is no fool. He knows who pays for his pipes."   Ouch.

Moreover, California Public Utility Commissioner Rachelle Chong wrote a great and thoughtful piece for the ACLI of the New York Law School that comprehensively debunks the call for net neutrality in: "The 31 flavors of the net neutrality debate: Beware of the Trojan Horse." Ouch. Ouch.

The Weekly Standard's cover story this week is "Google and its enemies -- the much hyped project to digitize 32 million books sounds good. why are so many people taking shots at it?"

• It's a very good in-depth look at one ambitious aspect of Google's legendary kleptomania of intellectual property.
• It also has some very insightful commentary about what this all means for Google's business model.

The article explains that Google is currently undertaking the most ambitious book copying project in human history, looking to scan 32 million books over ten years at an estimated cost of $800m.

The Financial Times reported that One World Trust is publishing the results of a new world survey that ranks Google worst in the world on openness and transparency.

• This worst in the world ranking comes on the heels of a recent Privacy International survey that also found that Google was worst in the world on privacy.
• Now two independent and respected non-governmental groups have independently found that Google is worst in the world on the values that the Google claims are very important to Google: openness and privacy.

One World Trust "conducts research on practical ways to make global organisations more responsive to the people they affect, and on how the rule of law can be applied equally to all.  It educates political leaders and opinion-formers about the findings of its research." 

•  Out of a possible score of 100 Google got a 17. Ouch. Even the math whizes at Google can see that is not a good score.
  • And sense the top performer, UNDP, got an 88, their is no grading curve that will save Google's bacon on this one.

It is good to get additional third party confirmation of many of the themes I have been blogging about for over a year and a half on Google.

An editorial by the New York Times on free speech points out that Google and other big Internet companies in fact oppose legislation that promotes free speech for those who most need it around the world.

• "Last January, Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey reintroduced the Global Online Freedom Act in the House. It would fine American companies that hand over information about their customers to foreign governments that suppress online dissent. The bill would at least give American companies a solid reason to decline requests for data, but the big Internet companies do not support it. That shows how much they care about the power of information to liberate the world." [emphasis added]

It seems all this Google-funded effort to cloak net neutrality as a "freedom of speech" issue by Moveon.org, FreePress, Public Knowledge and other Google-supported pressure groups, is just a cynical tactic and political ploy because Google actually opposes free speech when the rubber meets the road -- like with the "Global Online Freedom Act."

• In other words, Google supports freedom on speech when it benefits Google's business, but opposes it when it does not help Google's business.
• I just wish Google would be honest and forthright about their supposed "don't be evil" principles...  

The New York Times reports today in "Facebook Users Protest Online Tracking" that Moveon.org set up the online petition protesting Facebook's new program that automatically tells your 'friends" what you just bought online.

• I personally sympathize with users who want to guard their privacy -- which is not easy with the new Facebook program.

However, the reason I am blogging on this development is to spotlight the interesting Google-Moveon.org connection here and also Moveon.org's "situational ethics."

Let's connect some key dots:

I had to point you to a short, but great post by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch that shows how Yahoo and Facebook feel they must advertise on Google to reach Internet customers.

• He also included an interesting link to a previous post of his that spotlights how Google now has almost 40% share of online advertising revenues and how its share is rising surprisingly fast.

A core point I made in my "Googleopoly" white paper on the pending Google-DoubleClick merger, was why no competitor will be able to catch Google in search advertising, including #2 Yahoo and #3 Microsoft. (see pages 17-18 in particular)

Knowing I appreciate good satire, and especially good satire on Google, someone sent me the link to a 2005 spoof on Google that rings surprisingly true today...

Don't miss The Onion's: "Google plans to destroy all information it can't index."  

The Wall Street Journal article yesterday: "Google plans service to store users' data" is another stark reminder of the very dark cloud on the Internet's horizon -- Google's dominant "cloud computing" capability (i.e. Google's world-leading parallel processing computing grid and storage centers, which Google uses to cache a more-than-daily copy of every page of every website on the Internet and also every Google users' clickstream history.)

• According to the WSJ, Google is planning to offer a free way to store all the information on people's computer hard drives in Google's "cloud" -- ostensibly to give consumers the 'freedom" to access their computer's files from any where, whether or not they are at their computer.

Now why would Google want to give you that type of service for "free"? Because they want even more personal and total information about you than they have in your search history, in order to sell to advertisers even more info about your most private "hot buttons."

• If you are a free Google gmail user, Google already reads your email to send you targeted advertising. 
• If you use Google's free documents or spreadsheets, you may remember from a previous post of mine that:

In "Google's tar pit," an article in the Atlantic about how Google's market dominance is attracting antitrust scrutiny in Washington -- much like Microsoft did before it -- provides us a new "image" or "word picture" of Google.

The article starts with this wonderfully telling scene-setter: "

• "The lawn outside Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is dominated by the imposing visage of “Stan”—tail thrashing, jaws agape, a full replica of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever discovered. Stan mysteriously appeared on the lawn one morning several years ago, and is presumed by Google employees to have been a gift from the company’s quirky founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin."

So what does Google's choice of a T-rex as its corporate mascot tell us about Google?

First, non-Google paleontologists have gotten it all wrong about the T-rex.