For skeptics of Google's need for more transparency and accountability, consider the latest disturbing example of Google Chrome not asking tens of millions of Internet users for their permission to gain wide open access to their computers and content -- when it clearly should ask for permission -- like every other Internet browser provider does.    

Per ComputerWorld's article: "Google's Chrome now silently auto-updates Flash Player." 

• "Unlike other browsers, Chrome updates itself automatically in the background without asking for permission or prompting users that security fixes or new features are available." 
• "Google uses a unique approach, they don't ask users [for permission to update], they just do it" said Peter Betlem, Senior Director of Flash Player Engineering.  

What this means is that unlike all other browsers or Google competitors, Google does not believe it needs permission from users to gain wide open access to users' entire computer software and all its private contents.

FTC antitrust concerns over "inter-locking-directorates" reportedly have forced Kleiner-Perkins' John Doerr, to step down from Amazon's board, because he is also on the board of Amazon, a major book and cloud-computing competitor of Google -- per Miguel Helft's and Brad Stone's scoop at the New York Times Bits post.

This is the third (Amazon, Apple, Yahoo) too-cozy-for-antitrust-authorities, Keiretsu-like, Google business relationship that either the DOJ or FTC apparently have broken up. 

• (I will elaborate on each of these problematic Keiretsu-like relationships (Amazon, Apple and Yahoo) later in the post.)

Three different interventions by antitrust authorities involving Google's ties with three different Fortune 500 companies in eighteen months constitutes a pattern and underscores the depth and breadth of antitrust concerns that U.S. antitrust authorities have about Google.

Don't miss the hilariously poignant comedy video clip (4 min) of comedian Louis C.K. from Conan O'Brien's show on how "everything's amazing and nobody's happy."

• Louis C.K.'s lampoon of how ridiculous it is to whine when new amazing phone and broadband technology does not work perfectly or immediately, should be required viewing at the New America Foundation's planned whine-fest "panel discussion" entitled "why your cell phone is so terrible," which I previously blogged about yesterday. 

Like the parable of the boy who blurted out the truth that the emperor had no clothes on, after the emperor was duped by tailors claiming to use "special" thread only visible by "smart" people, the folks at the New America Foundation/FreePress are trying to dupe the FCC into mandating new net neutrality regulation by claiming that everyone who is really "smart," like the folks at New America, know that cell phones are "terrible." 

If you did not read my systematic rebuttal of how ridiculous a premise that cell phones are "terrible" is, please see my previous post for the evidence-laden case.        

The New America Foundation and Slate Magazine is presenting a forum on Friday April 2nd in D.C. entitled: "Why your cell phone is so terrible" featuring:

Ever since Google announced it suffered a cyber-attack from China, Google's legendary PR machine has gone into overdrive, opportunistically framing the conflict as a good versus evil story, and positioning Google as the Internet's benign superpower defending free expresssion, and as a new kind of business that puts morality before money.   

• Google understands it is easy to politically demonize China, because China's pervasive censorship and trampling of fundamental freedoms and human rights offend all freedom-loving people.

However, those willing to look behind the curtain of Google's self-serving political rhetoric here, will discover that many of the attributes that offend so many people about China, Google shares to an unfortunate extent.

• Let's review four significant strategic similarities between Google and China -- brought to you in Google's own words.

First, Google's leadership, like China, has affirmatively chosen to not be democratically accountable.

Yale University has postponed its adoption of Gmail in part because of concerns that Google will/can not tell Yale where or in what country their private information/data will be stored -- per Yale Daily News.

• "Google stores every piece of data in three centers randomly chosen from the many it operates worldwide in order to guard the company’s ability to recover lost information — but that also makes the data subject to the vagaries of foreign laws and governments, [Yale computer science professor Michael] Fischer said. He added that Google was not willing to provide [Yale] ITS with a list of countries to which the University’s data could be sent, but only a list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent."

It appears that Google continues to organize information for the benefit of Google's own engineering efficiency, simplicity and convenience -- without regard to what is best or safest for its users.

• WHERE users private data is stored by Google has immense implications for users' privacy, security and whether or not their private data/communications are vulnerable to subpoena, with or without their knowledge.  

This is further evidence of Google's cavalier approach to privacy and security of users.

Google continues to send very mixed messages to the world about Internet freedom.

While Google's PR machine has focused world attention on it's decision to stop censoring its search results in China, (which I commend Google for finally fulfilling), Google has downplayed its activist lobbying of governments around the world to mandate national net neutrality restrictions on the Internet.

• Like a ten-year-old that plays with matches and starts a fire he can't control... Google has been lobbying foreign governments hard to preemptively restrict Internet behavior, but when China continued to restrict Internet behavior the way it always had, Google claimed to be shocked, shocked, that a nation would restrict the Internet in their own national way and for their own national purposes and not the way Google wanted them to restrict Internet behavior...

Think about it. Is there any more mixed message than Google asking a foreign government to mandate a restrictive national net neutrality law or regulation to preserve Google's "innovation without permission" ethos?

PrecursorBlog is on hiatus for vacation.

In a remarkably ill-advised and irresponsible blog post, Mr. Feld of Public Knowledge attacked the State Department's Ambassador Phil Verveer for apparently veering from the strict orthodoxy of FreePress/Public Knowledge's view of net neutrality. 

• Ambassador Verveer was merely doing his job and speaking freely and forthrightly that other countries will obviously be watching what the FCC does, given that the U.S. has led communications-competition policy for two decades. 

First, everyone who knows Phil (and I have had the pleasure of knowing him for almost twenty years), knows Ambassador Verveer to be one of the most honorable, wise, measured, and capable professionals and public servants they know, period, full stop.

Second, it is exceptionally bad form and hypocritical for net neutrality proponents who claim the moral/ethical basis of net neutrality is all about Internet Freedom, Freedom of Speech, and that net neutrality is the First Amendent of the Internet, to quarter absolutely no dissent from the radical FreePress/Public Knowledge strict orthodoxy on net neutrality.

Wow. The evidence Viacom unearthed in discovery in their $1b copyright infringement suit against Google is surprisingly damning. The evidence shows willful, premeditated, deceptive, and organized efforts by YouTube, Google and Google-YouTube to infringe copyrights for anti-competitive and financial gain.

• Read the quote summary first here, then review the copious evidence/history in the 86 page Viacom Statement of Facts here, and then review Viacom's Summary Judgement memo of law here. 

So what are the broader antitrust implications of all this new and serious evidence of illegal activity and misconduct by Google-YouTube?

First, DOJ really blew it for not even asking for a second request of information on Google's acquisition of YouTube.