Competition

Google’s biggest problem is not being charged with violation of antitrust laws in Europe; its biggest problem is a gross violation of trust of its roughly two billion users.

Previously unknown facts about the FTC staff’s 2011 Google search bias investigation have the makings of a potential scandal and cover-up with broad repercussions for Google with the European Commission, other countries, the FTC, State AGs and Congress.   

The WSJ gained inadvertent access to the FTC’s 2011 staff report about its investigation of Google’s search practices. FTC staff concluded: Google abused its monopoly power in search and search advertising; harmed Internet users and competitors; and manipulated its search results by favoring its own content over competitors’ content.

The European Parliament reportedly is scheduled to vote this week on a political non-binding resolution urging the European Commission to “enforce EU competition rules decisively” against search engines, i.e. Google.

What is going on?

In a nutshell, this vote has three big effective implications. It is a political revolt and declaration of Independence from Google’s virtual hegemony. It is a rejection of former EC Vice President Almunia’s gross mishandling of the Google competition case. And it is a vote for a European “single digital market” to promote European economic growth and job creation.  

A Political Revolt & Declaration of Independence

GoogleNet is Google’s vision to leverage its proliferating dominance by offering global, near-free Internet-access, mobile connectivity, and Internet-of-Things connectivity via a global, largely-wireless, Android-based, “GoogleNet,” that is subsidized by Google’s search and search advertising dominance and by “open Internet” zero pricing of downstream Internet traffic.

A near-free global GoogleNet would be much like the Google Playbook which offers Android, Maps, YouTube, and others’ content for free globally, to disrupt and commoditize competitors in order to maintain and extend its search and search advertising dominance throughout the economy.

History should remember Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s speech in Berlin, “The New Gründergeist,” as the “Ich bin ein Bigfibber” speech, because of his many big fibs about Google’s antitrust and data protection problems in Europe.   

Claim: “Really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon” (not Bing or Yahoo.)

Facts: Google crawls 60 trillion unique URLs to create its search index of the world-wide-web; Amazon does not crawl or search index the world-wide-web.

Rep. Henry Waxman, Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote the FCC to propose that the FCC, in its pending Open Internet order remand, “reclassif[y] broadband providers as telecommunications services and then using the modern [Title I] authority of section 706 to set bright-line rules to prevent blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.”

Please see this <3 minute video here on “Why Promoting Muni-Broadband is a Ridiculously Bad Idea.”

• Kudos and thanks to Mike Wendy of Media Freedom for the production of the video!

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Big GoverNet Series

Part 1:  Cities learning there is no wireless "free lunch" [9-20-07]

European Commission Vice President for Competition Joaquin Almunia recently warned the European Parliament that “Microsoft was investigated [for] 16 years, which is four times as much as the Google investigation has taken, and there are more problems with Google than there were with Microsoft” per the FT article: “EU antitrust chief says Google case may be bigger than Microsoft.”

Why would the EC view Google as a bigger problem than Microsoft ever was?

[Note: Please find “Google’s WorldWideWatch over the WorldWideWeb” White Paper -- here.]

The European Commission’s 28-month-old Google search Statement of Objections is out of date and myopic.

What’s changed since the May 2012 EC-Google search settlement baseline?

Google has extended its May 2012 billion-user search dominance, into three newly billion-user dominant platforms (mobile, video, and maps), resulting in new competition complaints of abuse of dominance and new potential EC investigations – with Google’s abuse of its data dominance a common thread.  

Snowden’s NSA-revelations have changed everyone’s awareness of Internet surveillance and the vulnerability of personal data, contributing to the passage of much stronger data-protection legislation by the European Parliament and to a European High Court ruling on Europeans’ right to be forgotten.

Dear European Commission Official,

Unfortunately, the EC has learned the hard way. Settlements with Google don’t work.

First, Google’s leaders interpret DG-Comp’s publicly-signaled preference for a competition settlement over law enforcement to be a sign of sovereign weakness, and a lack of confidence in the EC’s sovereign resolve and law enforcement.

Second, Google’s leaders also interpret the EC’s repeated willingness to settle -- with no admission of Google wrongdoing/culpability and no meaningful penalty for past abuses of dominance – to practically mean that the EC’s sovereignty, rule of law and deterrent capability are all negotiable and open to surrender if Google pushes back hard enough.   

There is no other conclusion for Google’s leaders to reach. DG-Comp effectively surrendered its entire case three different times publicly: that Google is dominant, has abused its dominance, and warrants a fine and changed behavior.

In addition to that capitulation and pardon from responsibility for past abuses of dominance, DG-Comp also agreed to surrender the EC’s future sovereign authority to investigate Google search for five more years – almost the entire term of the next European Commission.