Google posted "Google's Privacy Principles" for International Privacy Day and made a pretty sweeping official representation to the public in its announcement post: 

• "We've always operated with these principles in mind. Now, we're just putting them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective."   

Is this a factually accurate and fair representation of Google's past and current privacy practices?

If it is indeed a true statement:

If Congress and the Administration truly are focused on lowering unemployment and creating jobs, one of the easiest things they can do is tell the FCC to not kill potentially tens of thousands of jobs by preemptively regulating broadband Internet access to address a non-existent problem.   

Kudos to the American Consumer Institute for an excellent study on the job-killing impact of a net neutrality industrial policy which would effectively chose competitive broadband companies as job losers and much smaller and less job-intensive netopolies as winners. (See summary of study here.)

It is amazing that with one hand, the FCC is working on a National Broadband Plan to allegedly help the nation advance economically, while its other hand is totally working at cross-purposes economically -- pushing proposed net neutrality regulations that would kill jobs.

We will learn in the coming weeks/months whether the FCC appreciates the real world around them, a fragile economy, persistent high unemployment and underemployment, and less investment, or whether they operate in a bubble imagining that their actions can only have positive effects on the economy and not negative ones.

We also will see if the FCC cares about the economy, jobs, and unemployment, or if they view themselves as independent of, and shielded from such real world concerns.  

January 27, 2010

For Immediate Release

Contact: Scott Cleland

703-217-2407

Media@GoogleMonitor.com

GoogleMonitor.com Launches Today

Will spotlight Google’s lack of transparency and accountability

Unfortunately FreePress long ago chose to be the gutter's beacon of low-road politics and not a shining beacon of high-road politics to emulate.

FreePress was unfortunately disingenuous in its Hill op-ed today, in saying "When is comes to Internet freedom, the United States of America can be a beacon to the rest of the world. But we must start at home."

If FreePress was genuine in believing that it is truly important to have a shining beacon of positive example for others to follow... why does FreePress not lead by example itself, and let its behavior and tactics in public discourse be a positive beacon for everyone else to follow?

Please don't miss Andrew Keen's outstanding and dead-on-point op-ed in The Hill: "Internet Freedoms and Internet Radicals." 

Mr. Keen brilliantly proves how radical and out of the mainstream FreePress' and Public Knowledge's views are in calling for radical, preemptive, and draconian regulation of competitive broadband companies that have long supported, and operate under, the high-consensus voluntary principles of net neutrality. 

FreePress has one  trick, demonization. Like anything else that is overused, abused, and not true -- it loses credibility and only reflects badly on those practicing it. 

Google generated probably the strongest annual revenue growth, 17%, of any large U.S. company this past quarter. 

• Given that Google is exceptionally non-transparent, the minimal guidance and insight that Google is required to provide as a public company always provides a rare glimpse into what is really going on at Google. 

What are the big takeaways from the earnings call?

First, Googleopoly continues to gobble revenue market share at a voracious rate because we know Google's revenues are up 17%, and Google's only significant competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft are continuing to lose ground, (as Yahoo is expected to report a revenue decrease on Tuesday so its search revenues can be assumed to badly lag Google's 17%, and Microsoft Bing's modest search share gains are not keeping up with Google's torrid search growth in a weak economy.)

Second, Googleopoly continues to show strong evidence of its dominant market power in pricing as its revenue growth of 17% is outpacing its paid click growth of 13% -- by roughly 30%. There is no stronger evidence of monopoly power than pricing power and Google clearly has pricing power aplenty.

In a brief but very important WSJ story, Google abandons any pretense that it is a neutral search engine/advertiser. See the WSJ piece: "Google advertises its China position with search ads."

• The story is worth re-reading a few times, because it becomes more disturbing the more one realizes all the implications of it.

The story reports that Google is doing something new in taking the top Sponsored Link ad position for itself in searches like "Google and China."

What this tells us, is Google, the search advertising monopoly per the DOJ, not only claims the top search result for itself for many searches in areas that Google owns content, like GoogleMaps, and Youtube, but now it also lays claim to the most valuable top advertising position as well to promote Google's public policy agenda. (If Google is willing to promote its China policy, why would it not promote its chosen political candidates? or its public policy positions of a variety of social issues targeted to users intentions/profiles that only Google happens to know?)

Google's behavior here belies its repeated representations that Google is a neutral search engine and runs neutral ad auctions. This should seriously concern the DOJ and FTC antitrust authorities, which are both investigating if Google is anti-competitively leveraging its monopoly position to dominate new markets that it enters.

While I generally disagree with ZDNet's open source columnist, Dana Blankenhorn's views, I regularly follow what he writes and respect his analysis and clarity of thought. 

Given all the talk of Google's many antitrust issues and Google's own denials that it is a monopoly, Mr. Blankenhorn's candor as a Google ally, was refreshing in his piece: "Open source and the Google Cloud:"  

•  "Google has achieved such economies of scale in delivering transactions and storage that competing with them over the long run looks foolish."
• "Unless you have a breakthrough that can balance out those cost disadvantages you’re really at their mercy. If Google decides to “embrace and extend” its cloud dominance into software and services you’re going to lose."
• "It’s Google’s world, in other words. Open source just lives in it."

Mr. Blankenhorn is on the mark in his analysis. Google's domination of search advertising has afforded it the cybrastructure scale and scope that no one can compete with and that can easily be repurposed to enter into and dominate any digital information or digital distribution business -- almost at will.

Why so many are concerned about Google and antitrust is because of what Mr. Blankenhorn candidly asserts: 

It is irresponsible for the FCC to consider self-creating new legal authority to impose net neutrality on ISPs by re-classifying currently unregulated information services as regulated telecom services (in the event that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the FCC does not have the legal authority to regulate the Internet in the FCC-Comcast case). 

First, claims of justifying such a hyper-regulatory potential FCC reclassification based on "the pro-competitive 1996 Telecommunications Act" is upside-down logic, given that the well-known purpose of that act was "To reduce regulation and promote competition...".  [bold added]

• After over a decade of successful experience and legal precedents promoting competition by reducing monopoly-era regulation, it would be a big lift indeed to try and justify re-imposition of the monopoly-era regulation that the Congress and the FCC have spent so much time and effort reducing.     

  Second, if the Appeals Court overseeing the FCC concludes in the Comcast case that the FCC does not have the authority to regulate the Internet under current law, does the FCC really think that that same court won't see through, and overturn, an elaborate FCC political ruse to manufacture legal authority all by itself without new congressional authorization?