To understand how Google is deceptively misdirecting attention away from their own ignominious record of serial property infringement by loudly accusing its competitors of being anti-competitive for enforcing their patent rights, see my new Forbes op-ed: "Google Asserts Property Rights Are Anti-Competitive."

This is important because:

• The FTC is currently investigating Google for a variety of deceptive and anti-competitive acts and behaviors;
• Google has a history of trying to distract law enforcement from focusing on Google by flinging accusations at others; and
• Infringement of competitors' property rights is arguably one of the most anti-competitive practices a dominant firm can engage in.

Few have connected the dots of how Google's serial mass infringement of competitors' property has been integral to Google's rapid monopolization of the search business and its strategy to rapidly extend that search business market power in most every direction.

Simply, no one can compete with unabashed property infringers.

Find the op-ed here.

FreePress with its "all complaints all the time" approach to advocacy has been caught once again "crying wolf" when there was no real problem or threat.

A new FCC study that shows ISPs are effectively delivering on the broadband speeds they advertise, exposes FreePress for crying wolf -- yet again.

• FreePress has to acknowledge Verizon's FIOs far exceeds advertised speeds, Comcast and Charter exceed advertised speeds, and other ISPs are more than close enough to advertised speeds to show that there is not a problem here for the FCC to be concerned about.

FreePress also continues to cry wolf about its spurious tethering" complaint against Verizon because users are prevented from unauthorized tethering of additional devices trying to bypass users' terms of service agreement.

There's more powerful evidence from Capitol Hill that the FCC's beleaguered Open Internet/net neutrality regulations are in serious trouble.

First, on July 27th, eleven GOP Senators on the Senate Commerce Committee requested in a letter, that the FCC conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the FCC's Open Internet Order, given the President's recent Executive Order directing independent agencies to reduce burdensome regulations.

In the end, the U.S. Government is highly-likely to approve the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, despite the significant opposition, because of three over-riding realities: 1) market/financial realities, 2)DOJ legal/precedent realities, and 3) FCC public-interest realities.

I.    Market Reality:

T-Mobile's leadership and owners have decided that they are unable and unwilling to invest what is necessary in order to compete going forward in the American 4G wireless market, and given that fundamental premise, the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is the optimal market outcome for T-Mobile's customers and for competition.

• T-Mobile shopped itself for a good while in order to fully test its market options and ultimately chose to merge with AT&T as the best outcome for all concerned from its perspective.

So the key baseline fact grounding the DOJ/FCC's decision processes here, is that T-Mobile's leaders/funders are effectively exiting this business one way or another long term via merger, sale or benign neglect.

Silicon Valley local merchants, who compete with Google Places, have complained to Silicon Valley's local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, that Google is effectively penalizing their online content so that in practice, no one can find them.

• See the article here: Local Business Site Challenges Google Ranking.
• See the site Google has penalized here: www.ShopPaloAlto.com.

This could have the makings of another Google antitrust complaint of interest to the FTC and/or the California Attorney General to determine if Google is being:

• Anti-competitive to an important local competitor to Google's own local offering, Google Places, or
• Deceptive in its representations of being an unbiased information broker and never manipulating search results for its own commercial benefit.

Where Google is vulnerable here, is that it is forcing its own self-serving and unappealable standard of online "authority" (which drives Google's search ranking and reinforces Google's market power), on the Silicon Valley local shopping marketplace, smack in the face of common sense and real life commercial authority in the physical marketplace.

New evidence, that Google's StreetView WiSpy cars collected and made public an additional category of sensitive consumer data (i.e the unique device identifiers or MAC addresses of consumers' personal smart phones and laptops) that was not previously known, strongly indicates that Google was deceptive with, and withheld essential evidence from, FTC WiSpy investigators last year. (The FTC's Section 5 authority states: "deceptive acts and practices...are...unlawful.")

• Based on credible new evidence that directly contradicts Google's public representations, the FTC should reopen its Section 5 Google WiSpy investigation to determine if Google deceived consumers and/or FTC investigators about what private information Google actually collected and used that could potentially harm consumers.

I.  New evidence of Google deceptive acts:

Kudos to CNET's Declan McCullagh for his outstanding and detailed reporting that uncovered this new and relevant WiSpy misrepresentation evidence.

Netflix continues to throw stones at the common economic practice of usage-based pricing, to which broadband carriers are naturally migrating, all while Netflix stands inside a glass house filled with mis-managed usage pricing practices. 

Netflix as Stone Thrower:

In a concerted campaign for net neutrality regulation that would ban broadband usage caps or pricing, Netflix has generated a:

• Supportive Washington Post blog;
• New York Times editorial,
• Wall Street Journal op-ed,
• Shareholder letter, and
• Faux net neutrality complaint with Level III-Netflix.

Netflix as Glass House:

Those interested in the ultimate legal fate of the FCC's beleaguered Open Internet order, should not miss Randy May's outstanding analysis of the D.C. Appeals Court's latest thinking on the FreeStateBlog.

Simply, Randy keenly spotlights a very relevant recent D.C. Court of Appeals decision overturning an SEC rule as a precursor/analogous decision of how that court will likely view the FCC's controversial Open Internet Order.

• Randy shows the Court currently has little patience for sloppy unsupported legal decisions (like the FCC's Open Internet order) where the agency "failed to make a rational connection between 'the facts found and the choices made.'"

Randy is dead on that this Court is very likely to show very little tolerance for the FCC's scant and lame justification for net neutrality regulation -- a justification that can be encapsulated in the well-known phrase of those who can't defend their position on the merits: "because we say so."

• This is more evidence that the FCC's net neutrality regulations are "dead regs walking."

How Google's deceptive and predatory search practices harm consumers is the focus of Part VIII of my four-year antitrust research series on Google. (See www.Googleopoly.net for the whole series.)

I. Summary:

My Googleopoly VIII white paper here presents evidence of four things of import to the FTC's current antitrust investigation of Google:

The latest strategic demonization of private enterprise by the radical information commons movement to promote net neutrality comes from Ms. Rebecca Mackinnon of the New America Foundation, who recently charged that private corporations have too much power over the Internet and effectively should be regulated as common carriers, when she previewed her upcoming book "The Consent of the Governed" at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, which was covered by the New York Times.

Ms. MacKinnon in her talk, employed a ridiculously bad and outrageous analogy that Internet users should fight against Internet companies' Internet tyranny like the barons in England fought King John's tyranny in 1215 by writing the Magna Carta.

• Ms. MacKinnon charged: "The sovereigns [corporations]of the Internet are acting like they have a divine right to govern."
• Obviously desperate to associate with, and legitimize her radical cause with the historical spark and bedrock event of today's freedom and democracy, the Magna Carta, Ms. MacKinnon trivializes the grand importance and relevance of the Magna Carta by misleading her audience that today's situation is somehow analogous -- when her analogy could not be further than the truth.

Consider how the 1215 Magna Carta baseline could not be less analogous with today's Internet baseline.