June 2012

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "FCC Special Access: Communications Obsolete-ism vs. Modernism" here.

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Obsolete Communications Law Op-ed Series:

Part 1: "Obsolete communications law stifles innovation, harms consumers"

Part 2: "The FCC's Public Interest Test Problem"

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Precursor Special Access Research Series:

Part 5: "FCC: Forced Access Economics & Selective Math"

Part 4: "Special Access Facts Show More Not Less Competition"

Part 3: "What's the Broadband Plan Implementation Vision? Affirming Competition Policy? Or the Retro-genda?

Part 2: "Special Access Nostalgia for Telecom's Bronze Age is No Path to 21st Century Broadband Leadership"

ICANN is revealing the biggest expansion of top level domains ever.

Given Google is being investigated for antitrust violations on four continents for anti-competitively favoring its own content over competitors' content, and for monopolizing search advertising, the dominant monetization engine for Internet content, learning Google's strategic plans for how Internet content potentially could be reorganized going forward could be... revealing to say the least.

Will Google seek more names than others and why?

Will Google seek to control new domains that could be used to better compete against Google... in other words to create new barriers to entry to competing with its monopoly scale?

Are there anti-competitive conflicts of interest for Google representing itself as an unbiased search engine and owning the registry for entire new domains that cover immense swaths of future content?

Will Google have a new anti-competitive incentive to rank higher content that resides in one of its owned domain spaces over domain spaces owned by their competitors?

Does Google have any secret plans to monitor traffic in these new domain spaces like they had in secretly monitoring WiFi communications of tens of millions of homes in 33 countries around the world without authorization?

Is anyone paying attention to the profound antitrust implications of Google applying to ICANN to become the world's largest domain registrar for Internet Taxonomy 2.0 -- the next generation of Internet addressing and classification of information? Giving the world's dominant search engine -- that is already under antitrust investigation on four continents for favoring Google content over competitors' content -- the additional market power of controlling the allocation of new keyword domain-names which Google would then index for publishers, rank for users, and monetize for advertisers, is an unquestionable conflict of interest and a recipe for more Google monopolization.

ICANN's original Internet taxonomy 1.0 involved truly "generic" top level domains as like .com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil, organized around institutional purposes and around geography to recognize sovereign nation authority like .US, .UK, .JP, .NZ, etc.

If you want to gain a better grasp why the net neutrality debate often yields such confusing and contradictory uses of the words "liberty" and "freedom" when people argue for or against net neutrality, please read CEI's Ben Sperry's take: "Net Neutrality: Two Concepts of Liberty."

Well said Ben! Incisive, insightful and illuminating.