Investment

Kudos to Jim Harper of Tech Liberation Front for eliciting a comment from Google's Vint Cerf on Mr. Cerf's public ruminations in favor of 'nationalizing the Internet'  which was reported first on TechCrunch and which prompted me to post why nationalizing the Internet was such a horrible idea. 

While claiming his comment:  "Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways?" -- was taken out of context -- Google's Mr. Cerf essentially repeats in his comment to Jim Harper's post -- the thrust of the thinking that has created the bruhaha:

The reality of market pricing for Internet usage is naturally gaining more attention.  

• The New York Time's had an informative Sunday page one story: "Charging by the Byte to curb Internet traffic." 
• Today the Wall Street Journal highlighted why market pricing for Internet usage is evolving with dramatic changes in the Internet marketplace in its story today: "Cisco projects growth to swell for online video."  

The big economic takeaway here is that in a free market Internet, where users have very different demand: i.e. needs, wants and means for speed, usage, mobility, latency, immediacy, reliablity, flexibility and other attributes -- suppliers (ISPs, application providers and content providers) must have the freedom to innovate, experiment and provide a diversity of choices, at a diversity of prices in order to meet the diversity of demand from users.

I wanted to follow up and build upon my post of last week: "The logic of Internet Pricing Diversity and the Fantasy of free limitless bandwidth."

•  I keep hearing this backward-looking refrain from net neutrality proponents that because some people characterize dial-up and early broadband bandwidth as unlimited or as an all-you-can-eat usage model -- that that model should never evolve or change.
  • Balderdash! This is some people's wishes being presented as analysis.

I believe U.S. Internet access consumers have come to understand at least two truths: 

For those who like the written format, here is the link to the transcript of Chip Griffin's interview of me on all things Google.

• The transcript is just below the podcast button to hear the interview.

This interview turned out to be one of the most comprehensive and in-depth discussions I have had on all things Google -- that's been captured for web listening or reading.

We discussed:

The free market Internet works. Both Time Warner Cable and Comcast are logically and naturally experimenting with free market solutions to address increasing network congestion problems that threaten quality of service, because of extremely high and disproportionate bandwidth usage by a small slice of the broadband population. 

• As widely reported, Time Warner Cable is experimenting in Beaumont Texas with a commercial offering that provides consumers with a range of choices based on their bandwidth consumption and desired speed, and includes a new $1 per gigabyte charge for usage above a plan's monthly limit. 
• Also widely reported, Comcast is testing in Chambersburg PA and Warrenton VA, a protocol-agnostic network management approach which would potentially delay all of the traffic of extremely heavy users during periods of serious network congestion -- in order to maintain quality of service for everyone.

Free market experimentation is the best, fastest and most efficient finder of solutions to complex difficult problems.

Here is the link to Chip Griffin's 28 minute interview of me on "Conversations with Chip Griffin," an in-depth conversation about many of the reasons why I believe Google is becoming such a big problem and why I personally spend so much time focused on Google.

I believe you will find it an informative, interesting, and entertaining interview covering all things Google, the online economy, net neutrality etc.

• Enjoy!  

I had to chuckle when I saw the headline: "Google CEO: Get Ready for Cellphone Ads" on the US News and World Report Blog.

• Google can't help but salivate over how valuable "targeted" ads could be on the most personal of devices -- the cell phone.

While Google's standard line is that Google is all about the "user" -- stories like this shed light on the truth -- it's really all about Google.

Google's self-centered, megalomaniacal mission to organize the world's information to be accessible and useful to Google -- blind Google to the very different privacy reality of the cellphone world:

Kudos to Box.net blog who created a clever Googolopoly board game modeled after the Monopoly board game most have us have played at one time or another.

Microsoft's resumed interest in Yahoo's search business, suggests that Yahoo is close to outsourcing some of its search to Google. The antitrust implications of the world's #1 and #3 online advertising competitors, Google and Microsoft, fighting over the #2 competitor, Yahoo, has finally attracted serious media attention.

Given that Google began offering online personal health records to the public yesterday, I thought it would be timely and helpful to repost in its entirety a previous post of mine from February 21, 2008 on why Google being in the business of storing personal health records is a really bad joke.

• The post has over twenty useful and illuminating links, and many of them contain mainstream documents that underscore why the public should be extremely wary about entrusting Google with its most intimate, private and personal information.

Below is my 2-21-2008 post in its entirety -- if you missed it, or care about this issue, it's a online privacy must-read post: 

AP reports "Google to Store Patient's Health Records." Let's count the reasons why Google storing Americans' private health records is a really bad joke.