DoubleClick

Learning that potential Republican Presidential candidate Fred Thompson loves blogging and understands the medium's growing and significant political influence, I encourage the emerging Thompson campaign to do a little homework on the Net neutrality issue so they are not blindsided and hoodwinked by this liberal Moveon.org issue masquerading in conservative "Internet freedom" rhetoric like fellow Republican candidate Mike Huckabee was a few weeks ago. 

Reuters reports that ebay will "resume Web advertising on a limited basis with Google..." 

• After witholding its advertising affections from Google for 10 long days, it appears that Google was sufficiently contrite and apologetic to eBay for its bad manners in competing with eBay by hosting a party for its competing online payment product, Checkout, in the same city as eBay's big confab that highlights it dominant online payment service, PayPal.

There are a few important points to be made about Internet "competition" here.

• First, there is little competition in the online auction listings. According to Jupiter Research, eBay has 95% of the online auction market, hence my "webopoly" moniker" for eBay.
• Second, eBay likes to tie its leading online payment service, PayPal to its online auction listings webopoly, because it does not allow its users to use Google's Checkout service.
• Interesting actual behavior for a company that fears potential broadband access problems via no net neutrality. 
• Third, there are some serious competitive conflicts of interest going on here between eBay and Google.
• The mature auction webopoly, EBay  apparently was successful in teaching aspiring search webopoly, Google, a thing or to about competition on the web.
• The message was "don't mess  with my webopoly, go dominate another corner of the Internet.
• Fourth, it appears Google got the message and realized it is in their profit maximizing interest to not fully compete with eBay, but focus its efforts on further dominating its access to content "corner" of the Internet by buying up DoubleClick and Feedburner.     

While I was very glad to hear that eBay continues to support extending the Internet Tax Moratorium, which expires in November, I found eBay's Brian Bieron's rationale for it very hypocritical given their stance on net neutrality.

National Journal's Tech Daily yesterday  reported that:

• eBay's "Bieron said he thinks the Internet has been working well and it would be a mistake to change any of the underpinnings to how it currently operates."

Hello eBay?

• If "the Internet has been working well" why propose to hyper-regulate it with new net neutrality legislation for the first time?
• If "it would be a mistake to change any of the underpinnings to how it currently operates", why don't you think new net neutrality regulation would not change the underpinnings of how the Internet operates -- from free market to government "managed competition"?
• I can anticipate your standard response, which is still bogus -- that the Internet has always been neutral and new legislation would just maintain the status quo.
• I wrote a one-pager that totally debunked this bogus claim your side continually makes.

Bottomline:  Net neutrality proponents cannot win on the merits and the facts of the issue, so they must systematically fabricate a problem, and misrepresent the context of the legislation as status quo.

Maine's Governor signed Maine's non-binding resolution on net neutrality today calling for a "study" of the issue due next year and also stated that net neutrality is a Federal issue, not a state issue, due to the interstate nature of the Internet.

Nevertheless, I am sure the net neutrality movement will try and make a proverbial silk purse out of this sow's ear.

If they continue spinning the media like they have this past couple of weeks, they will continue to badly misrepresent what Maine actually did.

• Misrepresentation and bogus claims is the standard MO of the net neutrality movement.
• They manufactured an issue in net neutrality, basically by fabricating a problem that does not exist, and then hammering bogus allegations.
• Like "chicken little" they scream that the Internet is in grave danger and will fall out of the sky, but they can provide no evidence of a real problem. And the sky clearly has not fallen.
• When confronted with this evidence, they trump up another bogus claim, saying that if they were not making it an issue there would be a net neutrality problem.

Net neutrality is a bogus issue. I fully expect the net neutrality movement to make the bogus claim that they won in Maine when truth be told the Snowe-Dorgan-like bill they asked for went nowhere.

• Folks that will manufacture a bogus issue have no problem claiming a bogus victory.

I have been watching with some amusement all of the SaveTheInternet-launched blogilantes ranting about the prospect of Internet backbone networks like AT&T or others, becoming a filtering technology solution to Hollywood's problem of rampant content piracy on the Internet.

Why am I amused?

• Because net neutrality proponents are so predictably knee jerk in their reaction to anything that they see as a threat to their datatopian ideal of a net free of any broadband competition, differentiation or diversity of choice.
• Net neutrality proponents have such a bad case of "myneutralopia" that they can't see the proverbial forest for the trees.
• Over the last year, net neutrality proponents have had to make an increasing number of big concessions about what "bit discrimination" is acceptable in order to remain credible on Capitol Hill.
• They have had to concede and support network management "discrimination" of bits:
• To filter out viruses, filtering which is essential to protect the Internet and users from Net blackouts or shutdowns;
• To filter out illegal spam, so the Internet and email remains unclogged and useful; and
• To allow for law enforcement under CALEA, the ability to surveil criminal and terrorist activity on the Internet.
• If all that network managment "discrimination of bits" is OK,
• Then why isn't it OK for these same network managers to filter traffic for pirated content, i.e. trafficking in stolen goods?
• In other words, if it is OK to filter the Internet for the misdemeanors and felonies of spreading viruses and spam, and it is longstanding law for the Goverment to be able to surveil the Internet to detect criminal behavior, how is new network filtering for illegal pirated content any different or any less necessary?

Once again, the net neutrality crowd's kneejerk reaction is to side with lawbreakers rather than with every day citizens and users of the Internet who are all ultimately harmed by allowing Internet-enabled crimes to go undetected and unnpunished.

I was surprised in yesterday's news splashes on the potential swap of MySpace to Yahoo for roughly a quarter of Yahoo.

I am blogging on this because the news follow-up does not appear to have connected the dots about how bizarre this combination sounds economically and competitively.

While on the surface it seems logical because Yahoo was reportedly in talks to buy MySpace before NewsCorp did.

What makes this bizarre is what has transpired since.

• NewsCorp took the no revenue MySpace exploding growth audience and did a deal with Google which guaranteed MySpace a minimum of $900m in ad revenue over four years.

Anyone concerned about their privacy should read the GREAT article in PC World on Google and privacy, and in particular should look at the call out box to see the risk about all that Google knows about you.  

• The article does a great job of explaining all the ways that others and the government could easily access tons of private information on you via Google's huge cache of private information on you.
• Google is quickly becoming the enabler of George Orwell's feared "Big Brother" in "1984."

Let's see if the mainstream press picks up on this obvious and interesting populist story... it has legs.

Anyone interested in privacy issues, should be on a heightened sense of alert, because Google has just won a big victory in getting its "pryware" deeper into the average American's private life.

The media focused only on the antitrust angle in covering Google's antitrust complaint against Microsoft, for not making it easy enough in its new Vista operating system for users to select Google as its search engine of computers' INTERNAL hard drive.

Reuters did a decent article on Google and growing privacy concerns about Google practices.

• My beef is with the editor's choice of words in the title.
• Either the editor does not know the real definition of "paranoia" or the editor was trying to cut the knees out from under the reporter's story and soften the article.
• I've included the definitions of "paranoia" and "fear" from www.dictionary.com at the bottom of this post.

"Paranoia" is either a mental disorder or a baseless suspicion.

• I don't think Reuters meant to imply that an American is mentally ill if he/she fears that their privacy is being invaded by Google recording and storing all of their searches and click paths, electronically reading all their g-mails, and surveilling many people's lives through Street View cameras.
• As you remember, anybody that stood up to the proverbial "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984, was also accused of being ill.

Let's keep an eye on Google's spinmeisters to see if this was just one editor who chose the wrong word, or if it is part of Google's talking points to defend itself against privacy concerns.

• My suspicion, is that the word came from Google.
• Oops! Does that candor make me paranoid?

par·a·noi·a –noun

Can you believe it?

Google launches its new public policy blog today and the NetCompetition/Precursorblog is not one of the blog links under "What We Are Reading!" Horrors!

First of all, it is not very "authentic" of the Google bloggers to not admit that they regularly read Precursorblog -- we know they do!

• Of course they do.
• It's just one of those guilty pleasures that they do behind closed doors because it is not politically correct at Google to expose one's mind to conservative or free market thoughts.  

Second, don't you believe for a minute that Google does not want to know what their latest public policy or PR vulnerability is.