Media reports apparently missed the subtle, but important and telling political weakening since April of the Administration's official position in defense of the FCC's beleaguered Open Internet Order.

• This relative official softening of the Administration's opposition to efforts to overturn the FCC's controversial net neutrality regulations means that it is more likely on the margin that:
  • This fall the Senate will pass a Resolution of Disapproval of the unpopular, and small-constituency-supported, FCC Open Internet Order, and
  • The President in the end, will not veto a bipartisan, bicameral rejection of unnecessary regulation of the Internet, which threatens the economic growth and job creation, and which has miniscule voter support.

Bottom-line the Administration officially signaled, albeit cryptically, that it would not veto the House appropriation bill that funds the FCC, among other agencies, specifically over the Congressional prohibition of the FCC spending money on implementing the FCC Open Internet Order.

To see the first free-market legal argument explaining how Google's market behavior systematically harms consumers under antitrust law, read my Forbes op-ed: "Google's Deceptive Practices Harm Consumers."

• This is important because Google and its defenders believe the benefits Google provides consumers are the bedrock of a winning antitrust defense.

Few have grasped the huge significance that it is the FTC (with its unique supplemental Section 5 authority) and not the DOJ, that is investigating Google for antitrust.

Most also have missed how vulnerable Google is to the charge that many of its marketing practices are illegal deceptive misrepresentations of its business.

My Forbes op-ed link is here.

Kudos to Ev Erhlich for an outstanding Huffington Post op-ed: entitled: "Why Liberals Should Think Twice About Net Neutrality."

• It effectively explains why net neutrality violates common sense and why opposition to net neutrality regulation should not be a partisan issue.

The FTC is centering its Google antitrust investigation on Google's predatory search practices that anti-competitively abuse Google's dominant market power to thwart competition.

• As the dominant online information access gatekeeper, Google has unique market power over the one place online where every business needs to be able to compete in order to be found by potential customers.
• At core, Google's predatory search practices manipulate search results to anti-competitively advantage some Google content and disadvantage some competitors' content, all while misrepresenting to the public that Google's search business is unbiased and never manipulates search results.

Google's Predatory Search Practices

The FTC would not have launched this investigation if it did not believe Google has dominant market power in search advertising, and as such, has special legal obligations to not abuse its market dominance to impede competition -- market obligations that non-dominant firms do not have.

• Gaining or enjoying dominant market power or a monopoly is not illegal, but it is illegal to anti-competitively gain, maintain or extend dominant market or monopoly power.

The fundamental rationale undergirding the FCC's net neutrality regulations in the December Open Internet Order appears to be crumbling before our eyes in both the U.S. and the EU -- enough so to raise the question -- could they be "dead regs walking?"

In the U.S., a new White House Executive Order calls on independent agencies like the FCC to revisit "regulations already on the books to reduce outdated, unjustified regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive."

Netflix's General Counsel, David Hyman, hypocritically and deceptively blasted the broadband industry for its natural migration to usage-based bandwidth pricing in his fact-challenged WSJ op-ed: "Why Bandwidth Pricing is Anti-competitive."

First, it is both ironic and hypocritical that the largest subscription video provider in the United States by subscribers, Netflix,  criticizes the normal economic practice of usage-based pricing as anti-competitive when other companies do it, when Netflix has long priced and capped its business offering based on consumer usage.

Mr. Hyman must have known Netflix would look self-serving and hypocritical if people knew:

In a Washington Post op-ed entitled "A smarter approach to cutting red tape," Cass Sunstein, the White House's Regulatory czar, laid out a laudatory plan for Federal executive agencies "to eliminate burdensome requirements that hinder economic growth and job creation," with a big loophole problem -- the plan does not apply to "independent" agencies like the FCC and its burdensome net neutrality regulations in the Open Internet order.

It makes no sense that the FCC's net neutrality regulations, the veritable poster child of "unjustified burdens and pointless red tape," have escaped:

• The fact that the President directed: "all executive agencies to cut costs, to promote predictability, to streamline paperwork requirements, to choose the least burdensome approach, to listen to those affected by the rules and, through our 'regulatory look-back' process, to eliminate rules that just don't make sense."
  • There was no net neutrality problem to fix before the FCC order, and there is still no net neutrality problem the FCC needs to address now.
  • So the FCC's Open Internet order is the worst of all worlds -- it is basically all cost and no benefit.

Four recent developments signal that net neutrality proponents of the FCC's December Open Internet Order are hearing footsteps and looking over their shoulder, increasingly concerned about the ultimate legal and political survivability of the net neutrality regulations/order.

First, professor Susan Crawford, one of the most ardent proponents of net neutrality rules and Title II reclassification, penned a telling and surprisingly candid analysis of how the Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn a California ban on the sale/rental of violent video games to minors, on First Amendment free speech grounds, very likely helps broadband providers' free speech argument to overturn the FCC's net neutrality rules.

• Professor Crawford concludes: "Today's news is that the absolutist approach of the current Supreme Court to protection of speakers of all kinds -- including distributors of speech -- signals that the carriers will be likely to find a sympathetic ear there."

The irony here is that a net neutrality proponent thought leader is implicitly acknowledging that the main slogan of FreePress/Save The Internet and others -- that "net neutrality is the First Amendment of the Internet" -- is a totally bogus.

In another blow to its competition policy credibility and objectivity, the FCC's 308 page, 15th Wireless Competition Report, amazingly reached no conclusion about whether the wireless market was effectively competitive, despite overwhelming evidence of effective competition throughout the report and a dearth of evidence in the report of any discernible anti-competitive issues that would suggest the wireless market was somehow not effectively competitive.

• The stark incongruity between the overwhelming evidence in the report, and the absence of what should have been an easy report conclusion that the wireless market is effectively competitive, is certainly not "data-driven policy making at work.
• It appears to be politics at work to support and provide political cover for the FCC's maverick policy desire to promote de-competition policy and more expansive FCC economic regulation and common carrier-like duties a la net neutrality and data roaming -- in the face of strong opposition from Congress and the Courts that the FCC is over-reaching its statutory authority.

If only the FCC absorbed the significance of the data compiled in their own report, the FCC would conclude that the wireless market was effectively competitive.

Find an FTC-Google Antitrust Primer here that asks and answers the Top Ten Questions about:

• Google's admission it has received a subpoena and is under formal investigation by the Federal Trade Commission for antitrust violations; and
• What the FTC is likely investigating and thinking, given that the FTC cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.

This primer is based on a combination of new analysis and an update of the best of four years of Google antitrust research, which can be found at: www.Googleopoly.net.

The Top Ten Q&A are: