Competition

Very interesting! Yahoo in an ex parte report by James Hedlund, Director of Yahoo! Communications Policy, after its meeting with the advisors of FCC Chairman Martin and the other commissioners, distanced Yahoo from the more radical stance of Google and Moveon.org's Save the Internet. 

The operative part is:

• "I reiterated our support for meaningful and enforceable net neutrality protections. To be effective, however, they must apply to all broadband Interent Access Providers, not just AT&T. For this reason, Yahoo! does not seek additional Net Neutrality conditions in this proceeding beyond the committments AT&T has already made. {bold empahisis added} Yahoo! continues to support adoption of generally applicable Net Neutrality protections in order to preserve innovation, competition, and openess on the Internet." 

Yahoo! Yahoo appears to be aware that principles are principle and that mugging a merger and extorting special conditions is a bad way to make public policy. A tip of the hat to Yahoo is deserved. Consider it tipped.

I continue to be amused at Google's "do as I say, not do as I do" way of doing business. As the online champion of regulating any "non-neutral" behavior by others, it is instructive to keep a close eye on the "non-neutral" things Google does in the market.

USA Today had a great article today, "Google offer takes on Paypal." Google is using its market leading dominance of the search market, 45% share and growing per Source Media Matrix, to leverage itself into other markets like online transactions, in very non-neutral ways. Some interesting quotes from the USA Today article:

• "Google has the potential to own this market...Paypal is essentially laying down and letting Google buy market share."
• "In a retail sense, Google is using Checkout as a loss leader to get market share works for Google, becuase they will make it up more with advertising, which is highly profitable."

So what is the point? Google routinely uses its market leverage (or is it market power?) in the online ad market it dominates "to buy share" or compete in a way that another company can't. This would be perfectly kosher, if, Google was not also the champion for making this type of typical Google market behavior illegal for broadband carriers, most of whom have dramatically less broadband share than Google has in its dominant market of search.

Today Microsoft launched a new program for telecom operators, carriers, software vendors and developers called "Connected Services Sandbox."   According to Microsoft "the sandbox will encourage the creation of "managed network mash-ups" in which Microsoft's Web services are combined with telecom services so Microsoft can fulfill its ambition of offering its software as a service model over the Internet.

• (Translation: Microsoft wants competitors to "play in their sandbox" so Microsoft and their preffered partners can watch them and get discriminatory preference in commercially exploiting others' resulting innovations.)

Has anyone at Microsoft thought this through? As I explained in my recent open letter to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's hamhandedness in Washington has already resulted in Microsoft being subject to the FCC's net neutrality principles and regulatory jurisdiction. This new endeavor is just another example in a long litany of Micosoft Internet businesses that are not neutral and discriminate for commercial gain.

How is their sandbox neutral? Let me quote directly from Microsoft's own press release which is pretty incriminating: "BT will have early exposure, visibility and access to the winning services including the ability to test and deploy the prototype services."  

Like a mugger who cries foul when his victim manages to wriggle free from their well-planned ambush and pummeling, net neutrality proponents are now crying foul that Chairman Martin is excercising his legal authority to engage Commissioner McDowell to vote to break the 2-2 impasse and vote on either approving or disapproving the AT&T-Bell South merger. 

Can you believe the unmitigated gall of net neutrality proponents playing the "victim" when they were really the mugger here? I guess we should not be surprised then when these same folks impugn the integrity and ethics of public servants who have assiduously followed the legal, procedural, and political processes. Any fair-minded person should be disturbed at the "ends justify the means" tactics of many net neutrality proponents in this proceeding. Â Ã‚ 

The NYT continues its leading coverage of the search business with its article today on Ask.com "The Retooling of a search engine." The article describes what I call IAC's discrimination and gatekeeper plan to turn around Ask.com and to make it a more popular and valauable search engine. 

Barry Diller, the head of IAC, has shrewdly collected many popular Internet sites, like Ticketmaster, Citysearch, HSN (Home Shopping Network) LendingTree.com, Evite, and Match.com, and ihas said publicly that they will more tightly integrating these popular sites with Ask.com's search engine. This is a classic gatekeeper model, which creates value by skewing search results to their home-owned sites. Now this is also called vertical integration, which is legal and has many benefits for consumers. To be clear, I believe vertical integration like this is just fine.

When I learned that Google was rushing in late in the process to demand a net neutrality amendment on the Michigan franchise reform legislation, the image that came to mind was that of a spoiled child seeing people building a sandcastle on the beach and running through the sand castle cackling with glee at the attention they could get from destroying others hard work.

I continue to marvel at the undisciplined naivete and brat-ishness of this $150 billion 8 year old company called Google. Like a spolied child that has gotten used to getting everything they scream for because of over-indulgent market parents who never said no, this company truly behaves like they think the world revolves around them and their demands.

Cisco has tremendous wisdom and clarity of thought on net neutrality, which Microsoft could greatly learn from. Mr. Chambers and his Cisco team "get" the net neutrality debate. And they should. Problably more than any one single company Cisco has done more to enable the phenomenon that is the Internet today. Does anyone think for a minute that Cisco wants to kill the goose that laid the Golden egg called the Internet? It is relevant to disclose here that I tried to recruit Cisco to join NetCompetition and they declined because they reasoned their interests were much broader, straddling the tech and com sectors and not simply a broadband perspective.

Dear Mr. Gates & Mr. Ballmer,

This letter warns that Microsoft's pro-regulation strategy in Washington is backfiring and is likely to end very badly for Microsoft. Microsoft's recent decision to withdraw from the ItsOurNet Coalition during FCC consideration of the pending AT&T-BellSouth merger, offers a golden opportunity for Microsoft to objectively reevaluate whether pursuit of permanent techcom regulation remains in Microsoft's best interests, especially given the experience and changes of the last year.

Upon closer examination, it is evident that Microsoft's:
A) Original political judgment behind the risk-reward tradeoff of net neutrality was badly flawed; and

B) Pro-regulation efforts have made the company worse off than when it started pursuing net neutrality regulation.

History is repeating itself. Microsoft is on path to get wrapped around the Washington regulatory axle just as badly as Microsoft got wrapped around the antitrust axle this past decade. Why history is repeating itself is that Microsoft apparently has learned little about the huge risks Washington can present to Microsoft. Just as Microsoft's political misjudgment got the company legally ruled a monopoly and under the thumb of DOJ and EU regulators, Microsoft's political misjudgment on net neutrality regulation is now endangering the future of the web services model that Microsoft has staked its future on.

I. Microsoft's original judgment of the risk-reward trade-off was badly flawed.

A. Microsoft has much more to lose than gain from Net Neutrality. Just like it’s never smart to play with matches in windy weather when you own a forest, it’s never smart to push for permanent regulation of market power when the political winds are blowing much more regulatory and your company has more market power than any other.

The call for net neutrality regulation, or banning Internet tiers, runs completely counter to the highly-successful, commercial evolution of the Internet.

A recent Cable World article by Paul Kagan "Paying the Piper" highlights this truth, that the "wave of the future" is bandwidth based billing. Usage-based billing is exactly opposite to one-size-fits-all net neutrality regulation. More usage-based billing better serves users becuase it allows them to buy just what they need. Light users pay less and heavy users pay more. As Kagan aptly points out, this is "a marketplace pricing solution that encourages consumers to regulate themselves."  Â 

"Charging for Google is like charging for air" this is a quote from an Oxford student at a Google encouraged "creativity session" on net neutrality. Â The thought embodies Google's goal to be as ubiquitous on the Internet as air is to humans. Where the metaphor crashes and burns is that Google does in fact charge for "air" -- it just charges others than the user for the privilige. Google is paid by advertisers the equivalent of 11 cents per search discrimination result.

• Lets be real. Google does not work for users, users don't pay them anything.
• Google works for advertisers; 99% of Google's revenues come from search advertising. Â 

As one of the greatest economic thinkers of all time, the late great Milton Friedman, said: "There is no free lunch." Somebody pays for it.