Congress needs to conduct oversight hearings to learn why the FTC is apparently giving Google special treatment, and more specifically why the FTC inexplicably dropped its Google StreetView spi-fi privacy probe without any charges, before it even learned all the facts, and without any accountability mechanism in place to protect consumers or prevent repeat violations.

Google's wanton wardriving in 33 countries for over three years secretly recording people's WiFi transmissions, including full emails and passwords, arguably is the single broadest privacy breach in the Internet era. And the FTC did nothing. And the FTC sees no need for any further action. Amazing.

What's wrong with this picture? A lot. A better question might be what's right with the FTC-Google privacy enforcement picture?

The FCC appears to have a glaring double standard when it comes to applying its "data-driven" policy analysis mantra of the last two years.

On one hand, the FCC seems interested in using its unique "data-driven" form of analysis to assert that the U.S. broadband market, (which based on market data is the most competitive facilities-based broadband market in the world), is not competitive and a market failure, so that the FCC can justify mandating new open Internet/net neutrality regulations and deeming the Internet to be a regulated telephone network.

• Moreover, the FCC also seems interested in using its unique "data-driven" analysis to assert that the U.S. wireless market, (which is among the most competitive in the world) is not competitive enough to promote enough innovation, so that the FCC can justify new types of FCC wireless innovation regulation.

On the other hand, in retransmission disputes between a cable broadband provider and content provider, the FCC appears to not want to do any "data-driven" analysis at all, because that might show obvious regulatory failure and not the market failure the FCC seems interested in finding most wherever they look in the communications sector.

Google's proposed purchase of ITA Software is likely to be blocked by the DOJ for five big reasons.

First, the announcement of a new FairSearch.org coalition of Google's Travel competitors opposed to the Google-ITA deal, which was first reported by Tom Catan of the WSJ, provides the DOJ with most all the elements necessary for the DOJ to block the deal: broad and deep evidence of anticompetitive effects from multiple competitors with deep understanding of the market, a sound theory of the case, and a number of credible witnesses willing to take the stand in court to block the deal.

Second, a key opposition counsel who represents IAC's Expedia, is none other that Tom Barnett, who was the DOJ Antitrust Chief in 2008, who blocked a previous Google attempt to monopolize in the Google-Yahoo Ad Agreement.

The FreePress-led movement calling for net neutrality is floundering badly, like a fish out of water.

• If FreePress' net neutrality/Title II agenda was as politically popular and powerful a political movement as FreePress has long represented it to be, we would be seeing evidence of that in this most political of seasons, a week before the mid-term elections.

The reason we now see near zero political support for FreePress' net neutrality/Title II radical agenda, is that FreePress' supposed "popular support" never existed at all; it was just a clever FreePress PR facade of "support" propped up by friends in the media and the blogosphere.

To understand the hubris of FreePress' chicanery, they never had material political support from even their most likely supporters.

With Canada, Spain, the UK, and 38 U.S. states all cracking down on Google's wanton wardriving spyfi scandal, where is the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the supposed lead agency on protecting consumers online privacy?

The FTC's silence and apparent absence from the online privacy enforcement playing field is particularly perplexing and alarming... because now it appears that we have a company that is out-of-control in tracking consumers' private actions online, and creating total information awareness power, while we have a supposed lead privacy regulator that appears not to be leading in protecting consumers' privacy...

The evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore that the FTC & DOJ, over the last two Administrations, repeatedly failed to enforce Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, and have allowed Google's acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and AdMob to illegally "substantially... lessen competition" and "tend to create a monopoly."

• This analysis will spotlight that Google's display advertising and mobile businesses would not be tending to monopoly, and would not be anti-competitively lessening competition, but for the illegal acquisition of market power via YouTube, DoubleClick, and AdMob.
• This analysis is also a sobering backdrop of the exceptionally high stakes for the competitiveness of the online travel vertical if Google is allowed to acquire even more market power via its proposed acquisition of ITA Software.

I.  Absentee Antitrust Enforcement & Market Failure

Free markets depend on both the rule of law and the equal enforcement of the law to prevent illegal monopolization.

We learned today that Google has the lowest foreign tax rate of the top five U.S. tech companies, an eyebrow-raising 2.4%, and that Google "cut its taxes by $3.1b in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda," per an outstanding investigative expose by Jesse Drucker of Bloomberg.

This exceptional tax dodging feat, while reportedly technically legal, nonetheless raises some important questions that no one has yet asked Google.

Japanese online retailer, Rakuten, has formally objected to the Yahoo-Japan/Google monopoly deal in a complaint to Japanese antitrust authorities (JFTC).

• I expect others in Japanese industry to also complain both publicly and privately to the JFTC.
  • First, the Yahoo-Japan/Google partnership would control over 90% of the Japanese search and search advertising business and also subordinate all Japanese online businesses, that depend on search to be found and/or monetized.
  • Second, the JFTC approval was a secret technical decision that amazingly did not consult or consider the views of any other Japanese stakeholders, even though the decision could eventually put much of Japan's online industry out of business in the years ahead.

In my Tokyo speech to industry stakeholders last month, I explained how a Yahoo-Japan/Google search advertising monopoly inevitably would lead to dependency, decline and disintermediation for Japan's high tech industry and economy.

It is logical, sensible, and basic survival instinct for Japanese stakeholders -- whose fate would be totally at the mercy of a Japanese Googleopoly -- to voice serious objections privately and publicly to Japanese regulators.

Apple's CEO Steve Jobs is wise to publicly debunk Google's claim that: Google defines "openness" (aka -- good), and Apple defines "closedness" (aka -- evil).

• As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: Google's concept of "openness" is "much easier to understand by opposition" so he defined Google's approach as the "inverse" of Apple's.

Google is right that they are the inverse/opposite of Apple, but not in the way that Google claims -- being open/neutral vs. being closed.

The current harm to consumers from the latest unnecessary incident of retransmission brinksmanship is the clear result of FCC regulatory failure.

Fellow ardent free marketer, Randy May of the Free State Foundation, has a dead on piece that I highly recommend that exposes that the current broadcast retransmission negotiating process -- as no "market" that a free marketer would recognize.

• A set of FCC rules that still fantastically assumes a monopoly video market exists, when one clearly has not existed for well over a decade, creates a profound regulatory failure that distorts the market and harms consumers.

The reason some consumers currently are blacked out from their favorite sports programming is because the FCC has known for a long time, that it has a broken, out-of-date, and counter-productive retransmission negotiation process, and that it has not done anything to bring the process into the 21st century or to correct the dysfunctional imbalance that causes predictable serial disputes that harm consumers.

Simply, if the FCC spent less time on trying to fix potential unproven problems, like net neutrality and Title II regulation for which the FCC does not have legal authority, and more time on fixing actual problems harming consumers on their watch that they do have the authority to fix -- American consumers would be much better off.

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