DOJ

Google-Android sacrifices users’ security, privacy and data protection to scale Android fastest so that Google can dominate mobile software and advertising.

This charge and analysis is timely and relevant because Reuters is reporting that European Commission competition authorities are “laying the groundwork for a case centered on whether Google abuses the 80 percent market share of its Android mobile operating system to promote services from maps to search.”

The purpose of this particular analysis is to help a user better understand how they are harmed by Google-Android’s disregard for data protection.

The mounting evidence indicates the FTC is AWOL on Google.

Currently there are no less than six important Google enforcement issues that that the FTC should be investigating, but apparently is not.  

In stark contrast, the EU has many serious problems with Google’s >90% dominance and its persistent disregard for Europe’s privacy, data protection and the right to be forgotten requirements.

An American Google enforcement vacuum stiffens the EU’s resolve and adds to the need and urgency for the EC to step in to preserve the rule of law in Europe.

An absentee FTC, which is largely ignoring consumer choice, also makes it harder for the U.S. to preserve the US-EU safe harbor for the handling of personal information in the pending Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Post-Snowden, the US and EU are far apart on data protection, and a glaringly absentee FTC only exacerbates that divide.

Please see my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “Top 10 Failures of FCC Title II Utility Regulation.”

The FCC has had a failure-prone, seventy-year track record implementing Title II telephone regulation.

It is important to remember what the FCC did in the past with Title II authority, because those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.  

It is Part 56 of my FCC Open Internet Series.

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FCC Open Internet Order Series

Part 1: The Many Vulnerabilities of an Open Internet [9-24-09]

Please see Google’s new and updated Privacy Rap Sheet here.

Google’s uniquely awful privacy record makes it wish Google had its own “right to be forgotten.”

And Google clearly wants the EC to forget its digital and data dominance, and its many abuses of dominance of Europe’s digital and data economy, because Google knows a core enabler of its market dominance is Google’s willingness to disregard privacy and data protection laws for anti-competitive first-mover advantage.

Google knows data protection rules, and requirements of consumer consent are impediments to gaining dominance -- so it simply ignores them while publicly proclaiming to respect them. Google has learned that its willingness to do what other competitors will not is an unbeatable competition advantage in the marketplace.   

Google’s Privacy Rap Sheet

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 18, 2014

Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

The AT&T-DirecTV Merger Increases Competition & Consumer Choice, Providing:

A New Stronger Competitive Alternative to Cable’s Bundle; and

NetCompetition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                           

May 15, 2014

Contact:  Scott Cleland --703-217-2407

FCC Rules Take the “Auction” & “Incentives” out of the Supposed “Incentive Auction”

Auction will under-earn with FCC thwarting market forces by picking winners & losers   

Dear School Administrators, School Boards, and Parent Associations,

If you assume Google is careful to protect your students when they use Google Apps for Education, you are sadly mistaken.

Too many assume that someone else must have done the due diligence necessary to ensure that Google Apps for Education adequately protects students’ privacy and safety, because they unfortunately did not. If they had, they would have been alarmed at Google’s shocking history of knowing disregard for the privacy and safety of their users including students.

This open letter will spotlight student privacy/safety concerns with Google that responsible parents and educators would want to know, given that Google Apps for Education, and Google’s other services, pervasively insinuate themselves into so many aspects of their students’ education and private lives.

It also will provide an important jumpstart to long-overdue, better due diligence of Google’s impact on student privacy and safety. Better late than never, the old adage says.

Dear European Commission Official,

Would Interpol, or any EU prosecutor, ever recommend pursuing a lenient settlement with their overall #1 worst offender -- without extracting any punishment, restitution, admission of wrongdoing, or deterrent effect -- rather than prosecuting the worst offender to the full extent of the law?

Would any other prosecutor publicly threaten swift prosecution against a high-profile defendant repeatedly and then give the defendant three chances to settle over a period of several months when the defendant’s first two proposed remedies proved to be demonstrablydeceptive in market tests?  

Of course not! That would be antithetical to the fair, honest, and effective administration of justice.

Then why, after its own investigation found Google to be dominant, and to have abused its dominance in four distinct ways, is DGComp strongly advocating that Google be protected from prosecution for clear violations of EU competition law?

Please don’t miss my new Daily Caller op-ed: “The FCC Disincentive Auction.”

• It exposes an auction at war with itself, with more economic disincentives than incentives to bid.
• It also spotlights the irony of FCC auction rules that approve a de facto Sprint and T-Mobile “wireless duopoly” of auction bidders.  

It’s Part 13 of my Spectrum Waste Fraud & Abuse Series. 

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Spectrum Waste Fraud & Abuse Series

It appears the FCC may be betting again that it is smarter than everyone else in the marketplace. Time will tell.

From the various reports of briefings about the FCC’s planned rules for the 600 MHz incentive auction, two things appear clear. First, the FCC doesn’t trust market forces. And second, the FCC doesn’t want the highest bidders to win the spectrum.

Apparently, the FCC is trying to produce something for everyone in this now circus-like auction process – a proverbial, dazzling three-ring-circus of political compromises that catch and keep different people’s attention.

At core, the FCC reportedly is adding a third ring to the already-complex, unprecedented, two-ring circus of the incentive auction. The first ring is the incentive reverse auction of broadcasters bidding for what they must earn in order to sell their spectrum, and the second ring is what wireless companies will then pay to own the broadcasters’ spectrum.

The FCC wants to add a third ring to this growing auction spectacle. Reportedly the FCC is going to effectively create yet a third auction process that would commence when certain, not-yet-known auction revenue targets are met in the auction. Below those FCC-determined-revenue-targets anyone can bid. Above those targets, the largest potential bidders’ opportunities to bid further would be dramatically restricted.