December 2009

Add StudioBriefing.net to the list of companies like TradeComet and Foundem that have been snuffed out by Google's arbitrary exercise of its search advertising monopoly power to pick what Internet content lives or dies.   

In an 11-28-09 letter to its readers, StudioBriefing.net, the blog arm of "the longest-running entertainment-industry publication on the Web," had "no alternative but to shut down" because Google arbitrarily removed them from their Internet search results and from running Adwords advertising. 

Read StudioBriefing.net's letter and the similar complaints by TradeComet and Foundem, to appreciate Google's monopoly power, arbitrary exercise of it, and its power to literally snuff out Internet content companies that do not comply with Google's opaque edicts.

Isn't what Google has done to Studio-Briefing.net, TradeComet and Foundem, exactly the type of non-neutral anti-competitive behavior that Google claims to oppose in its vocal support of net neutrality legislation/regulation for their competitors?

• How can consumers be free to access the Internet content of their choice, if Google can effectively block that access by unilaterally making the content undiscoverable and/or economically unviable?

Craig Newmark of Craigslist, a leading net neutrality proponent, posted another strong support of net neutrality on Huffington Post where he shared Consumer Reports definition of net neutrality.

In another tech elite case of "Do as I say, not as I do," it is particularly ironic that Mr. Newmark is publicly championing how important it is for dominant players to not block traffic on the Internet, at the same time, Craigslist, the most dominant online classified ad site in the U.S., is blatantly blocking a new mashup called Flippity and "every single project built on Yahoo Pipes," per TechCrunch's post yesterday:

• "Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes After Dev Shows Craig His New Mashup." 

Why is the FCC changing its current consensus net neutrality principle #4 that consumers are entitled to competition among service providers, application providers and content providers, to a non-consensus principle in the FCC's Open Internet proposed regulations that consumers are no longer entitled to applications or content competition online?

As part of Google's previously announced plan to make the Web faster, Google announced yesterday a Google engineering alternative system to the Internet's current core, the Domain Name System or DNS. 

• Google believes that Google's new addressing system is faster and more secure than the current Internet addressing system, which is run by the independent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) and which is essentially the Internet's de facto "phone book." 

This is a big deal. Google is essentially saying it can do a better faster job for the Internet than the current ICANN can. Listen to ICANN's self description:

• "To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet.
• ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.
• ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet."

Google's mission to organize the world's information also increasingly makes Google the World's self-appointed Supreme Information Authority. When politics, facts, science, whatever... are in dispute... Google's engineers and secret algorithms will provide the world with the answer, the "truth." 

Who needs a society of Cartographers when there literally is:

• "The World According to Google."
  • See Google's latest post to see where Google is taking the world's information and the world's boundaries.  

The big implication of all this is why will there need to be any non-Google input into how the world's information is organized when Google's all-knowing engineering elite can much more efficiently decide for us all?

• Information may be power, but Google assures the world that Google, would never would take sides on any type of information dispute... or could they?
• Wait a minute isn't a ranking implicitly taking sides on what is the best information and what is not?
• The subtext here is don't get on the wrong side of Google, or your information may get sent to "the back of the arena," as one Google Sr. VP so aptly put it in a prominent Google blog post.