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May 2011
New Evidence Increases Google's Antitrust & Privacy Risk
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Sun, 2011-05-01 22:58New "smoking gun" incriminating and damaging evidence from court documents in the Skyhook vs. Google court case, likely increases Google's antitrust and privacy risk on multiple fronts. (For background on the Skyhook case see here, here.)
A must-read piece by Mike Swift of The Mercury News, details how, in May 2010 just after the WiSpy scandal broke, Google's Larry Page (who is now CEO), had an email exchange with senior executives that made clear how strategically important building a WiFi location database was to Google's Android and mobile strategy.
- This new "smoking gun" evidence has very broad and serious implications for many different antitrust and privacy investigations into Google because it shows Google's senior leadership were fully aware of what the company was trying to accomplish in its WiFi location database efforts, and more importantly, it confirms Google's strong business motive and intent to more aggressively to dominate WiFi location services.
Implications of the new evidence:
Antitrust:
Google's Anti-Management Bias Problem
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Wed, 2011-05-04 11:16In a remarkable admission for a senior public company executive, Google Chairman and longtime former CEO Eric Schmidt told Gigaom: "At Google, we give the impression of not managing the company, because we don't really. It sort of has its own borg-like quality if you will. It sort of just moves forward."
If the executives ultimately responsible for "managing the company" to ensure it proactively respects users' privacy, vigilantly guards against security and data breaches or property infringement, is not really "managing the company," it now makes sense why Google has so many privacy scandals, and security and property infringement problems.
Generally protecting privacy, security and property rights are not engineering goals unless company management and managers have internal control and management focus, systems, processes, and procedures to ensure they are a priority to engineering teams.
Google's lack of interest in management execution is evident in Google's:
The Big Unanswered Net Neutrality Questions
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2011-05-05 19:26The latest debate over net neutrality regulation in the House Judiciary Committee today spotlighted for me three big fundamental questions that the FCC has still not answered.
- If the alleged net neutrality problem the FCC claims to be trying to solve in the Open Internet Order was so incredibly urgent to put in place in December, that everyone's holiday plans at the FCC had to be disrupted, why is the publishing of the rules in the Federal Register happening at such a leisurely, anything-but-urgent, pace?
- When the law of the land has a clear national policy bias "to promote competition and reduce regulation," how does the FCC legally justify an FCC Open Internet policy bias to promote regulation and reduce competition?
- How can the FCC use an obviously de-regulatory, pro-competition provision of law, Section 706, to legally justify an obviously regulatory de-competition Open Internet Order?
Google vs Apple: How Business Models Drive Disrespect vs Respect for Privacy
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2011-05-06 15:13How business models are aligned or not with users' privacy interests, will be spotlighted at the Senate Judiciary hearing Tuesday on "Protecting Mobile Privacy" featuring Google and Apple officials as witnesses.
- Expect the term "privacy conflict of interest" to become more common and important as companies who don't work for users, hurtle into the future increasingly tracking, analyzing and using users' private information and behavior without users' meaningful consent.
While the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy will hear from both Google and Apple witnesses on how their companies handle users' WiFi location data, their testimony will provide stark contrast in the companies' privacy conflicts of interests.
Google vs Apple concerning alignment with users' interests:
First, 97% of Google's ~$30b in annual revenues comes from advertisers, whereas ~99% of Apple's ~$87b in annual revenue comes directly from customers who buy and use Apple's products and services.
Pro-Regulation Camp Seeks to Undermine Competition Policy in AT&T/T-Mobile Review
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2011-05-09 15:00Like pro-regulation forces did everything they could to undermine competition policy to justify FCC net neutrality regulation last year, those same FreePress-led pro-regulation forces are focused in 2011 on trying to characterize the AT&T/T-Mobile combination as a threat to competition -- so that they can impose new regulations on AT&T that they can then try and force on the rest of the industry.
The problem is that the FreePress-led pro-regulation forces are trying to convince people of the preposterous claim that the AT&T/T-Mobile merger will reconstitute the Ma Bell Monopoly when the obvious facts are that AT&T is no longer dominant 27 years after the Bell-break-up.
The Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on the AT&T-T-Mobile merger is entitled: "The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger: Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?"
Just like it was preposterous last year that the U.S. was falling behind on broadband because of insufficient competition, it is preposterous that the AT&T/T-Mobile merger will reconstitute the the Ma Bell monopoly.
Announcing My New Book: Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2011-05-10 11:57I've long thought there was a big untold story about Google, essentially a book all about Google, but told from a user's perspective, rather than the well-worn path of Google books told largely from Google's own paternal perspective.
- (You can buy the book, Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc. at www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com, Telescope Books, Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Apps, Barnes & Noble, The Nook, and The Nook Apps.)
Given that Google is the most ubiquitous, powerful and disruptive company in the world, it seemed logical to me that users, and people affected by Google, had a lot of important and fundamental questions about Google that no book had ever tried to answer in a straightforward and well-defended manner.
My Network World Interview on Google's Privacy & Security
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2011-05-12 11:47My Forbes Op-ed on Google's Disregard for the Law
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2011-05-13 16:08My new Forbes' op-ed: Google Disregards the Law, tells the sordid story behind today's story of Google apparently agreeing to settle a criminal investigation with the Department of Justice for ~$500m for promoting and accepting advertising from illegal online pharmacies.
- The op-ed sadly chronicles that this latest law-breaking by Google is part of a well-established pattern of disregard for the rule of law.
- If one cannot trust a public Fortune 100 company to obey the law, one cannot trust them overall as I explain in much great detail in my new book "Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc."
- See: www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com for the different ways you can buy the book.
Google has 93.7% Share of U.S. Search Revenues & Is Rapidly Taking Share
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2011-05-16 18:14
With reports of the FTC's looming antitrust investigation of Google, it is highly-relevant that Google now has ~93.7% of U.S. revenue share of search advertising and that Google has taken ~26% of the search advertising revenue share that it did not have a year ago.
- Google continues to relentlessly gobble up massive search advertising revenue share from its only significant competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft (which have combined forces in search in the last year), in part because:
- Google's relevant search revenues are 24x bigger than Yahoo's and 39x bigger that Microsoft's; and
- Google is growing its huge search revenue base so much faster -- +27% to Yahoo's -19% and Microsoft's +14%.
- (These revenue share calculations are relatively easy to do -- they are explained in detail at the end of this post.)
Many do not realize that antitrust authorities already believe that Google is a monopoly, because the most commonly cited market share numbers in the media are from ComScore, which tracks share of searches not search advertising revenue share.
