Kudos to Pat Brogan of US Telecom for his first-of-a-kind analysis/ranking of how much different countries actually use the Internet per capita.

• It is outstanding work and adds a highly instructive and necessary new dimension to the discussion of the FCC's preparation of the National Broadband Plan and the debate over whether the U.S. is falling behind on broadband.  

The USTelecom summary description of the study's findings is below and can be found here. The letter communicating the study to the FCC is here.

"U.S. Among Top Nations in Volume of IP Traffic per User, New Analysis Shows

WASHINGTON, D.C.—While the debate rages on about the merits and limitations of various international broadband rankings that attempt to examine network performance and other factors, USTelecom today released fresh insights into an often-overlooked aspect of the national broadband debate—actual usage by Internet consumers. The analysis, based on data from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index and Internet World Stats, shows that the United States is among the top nations in the world in volume of Internet consumption per online user.

FreePress, which philosophically opposes competition policy, effectively is mocking antitrust law and authorities by cynically feigning to care about antitrust and competition in calling for an antitrust investigation of "TV Everywhere" efforts to enable authenticated paying video customers the additional convenience of accessing their paid-for content on any device at no extra cost. 

• FreePress is misrepresenting its latest report -- "TV Competition Nowhere" -- as antitrust analysis when it is standard FreePress villain-ization of broadband and media businesses.   

In their own words, FreePress is anti-competition, anti-property, and anti-business. 

The latest whistleblower of Google anti-competitive behavior, Adam Raff of Foundem, wrote an excellent op-ed in the New York Times last week that should not be missed, and that explained why Google is a much greater threat to an open Internet than anyone else. (To learn more about Google's monopoly bullying of Foundem, see "Foundem's Google Story" at www.searchneutrality.org.) 

What's also troublesome here is the reflexive bullying and impugning of the credibility of the victim by Google apologists, that apparently assume that if Google did something to Foundem, Foundem must have deserved it... because the Google apologists assume Google's search algorithm and business can do no wrong (even though they, nor any independent third party, has ever reviewed or audited Google's search algorithm or quality score for neutrality or anti-competitiveness.)

Precursorblog is on hiatus for the holidays.

Google posted its treatise on "The meaning of open" designed to redefine the word "open" in Google's image. It is an important read because it is a bay window view into the altruistic way that Google yearns for the world to perceive it.

• Like most all of Google's PR, however, Google's Treatise on "The meaning of open" may be "the truth" as Google sees it, but it is certainly not "the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

I.   Google's  Open Double Standard

Simply, Google is for "open" wherever it does not have a monopoly or dominant market position, however where it does, as in AdWords, AdSense and search advertising syndication, it is closed, to ensure that its dominance remains impregnable to competitors.

In the height of irony, Google has cleverly flipped a concept that was originally designed to be a sword of competition to a closed monopoly, and applied it as a political/PR shield to protect Google's closed monopoly from competition. 

Kudos to Bret Swanson for his outstanding debunking of the approach and conclusions of the FCC's Berkman study on broadband policy lessons in his Real Clear Markets piece, "Harvard's Berkman Study Bungles Broadband." 

• To the extent that the FCC wants its decisions to be fact-based, data-driven, and respected, the FCC's National Broadband Plan conclusions can not rely on this exceptionally flawed Berkman study.
• The old adage is true: "garbage in garbage out."  

Google's reported likely acquisition of Yelp, a popular review site for local businesses in major cities, does a lot to bring Google's broader monopolization strategy into clearer focus.

• Yelp is potentially just the latest in a slew of strategic information-related acquisitions that Google has made, that when looked at individually -- look small and innocuous, but when looked at together and as a cumulative pattern, appear eerily reminsicent of the classic monopolization tactics of Standard Oil's monopolization of the oil industry via acquisition of oil producing/distributing networks in the late 1800s and those of pre-1911 AT&T in rolling up most of the nation's telephone networks via acquisition.
• Google is simply replicating the same type of monopolization strategy for the 21st century by acquiring key strategic information producing/distributing networks.

The following list of strategically important Google acquisitions belies the conventional wisdom that Google's scale and scope have been grown organically and as a result of Google in-house innovation.

Since the EU-Microsoft settlement now will allow users to select an Internet browser from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera among others, the next relevant competitive issue with browsers is if the browsers themselvesa are operating clandestinely in an anti-competitive or closed way.

• In other words, whether or not browsers are non-neutral and divert the user somewhere against the user's expressed choice. 

As I have discussed before, Google's Chrome is not an Internet browser, but a gateway to Google's datacenter to browse Google's mirror copy of the Internet and track the user's every movement. 

Kudos to Randy May of the Free State Foundation for his outstanding op-ed in the Washington Times today: "Voiding the Constitution: FCC rules could counter free speech."

• Randy's must read piece explains why net neutrality rules would perversely accomplish the exact opposite of what net neutrality proponents claim.

At core net neutrality proponents are trying to advance the preposterous notion that competitive broadband companies, the biggest enablers of free speech in the country, are somehow more of a threat to Americans' free speech than the Federal Government, which, unlike broadband companies, has extensive potential coercive power to limit free speech, if not for the constraint of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.