Open

Google's Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf recently asked publicly: "Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways?" according to a post by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. 

• Since the Government neither owns or maintains the Internet today, Google may have much grander plans for 'nationalizing the Internet' than anybody appreciated.
• Maybe we should take Google's CEO Eric Schmidt much more seriously when he declares: "The goal of the company is not to monetize anything," "The goal is to change the world -- and monetization is a technique to do that."  

Let's dissect how radical and destructive Google's notions for nationalizing the Internet are.

Pablo Palatnik, an online marketing expert, recently launched his own blog, the Palatnik Factor which I recommend; Pablo is also a contributing writer for the Search Engine Journal -- which is where I came accross his work when he wrote a dead on piece questioning "Google Adword's Quality score: affilitates worst nightmare." 

• Because of that post, I reached out to Pablo with my post: "Why a lack of openness sullies the integrity of Google's ad auctions," and he posted it with a comment.  

A couple of my recent pieces are particularly relevant to online marketers:

http://www.precursorblog.com/content/why-not-a-marketer-bill-rights-google-yahoo-cartel

I had to chuckle when Google CEO Dr. Schmidt publicly explained his management system for Google last week -- I 've dubbed it -- 'The One Sentence Manager.'  

• In a speech to Washington insiders at the Economic Club where Dr. Schmidt exhorted how the world could learn a lot from Google's "scalable values"...
  • Dr. Schmidt actually admitted how hard it was to get Googlers to be accountable to his minimalist automated reporting requirement of writing a one-sentence summary by email of what that person did that week.
    • He further explained that his automated system would "harass" the people with ever increasingly funny prods -- until they complied.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows one of my pet beefs about Google is how completely unaccountable Google is and how they go out of their way to remain unaccountable to anyone or anything.

To the extent Google and Yahoo's new partnership in search and display advertising diminishes #2 Yahoo's viability to competitively discipline #1 Google's dominance of search and online advertising, online marketers and advertisers need Google-Yahoo to commit to respect a "Marketer Bill of Rights."

• Google-Yahoo jointly control:
  • 83% of U.S. search advertising share per eMarketer; and
  • 64% of all U.S. Internet advertising revenue per the IAB.
• Google's has ~1,000,000 advertisers in its network, compared to Yahoo's ~300,000 and Microsoft's ~75,000.

Marketer's Bill of Rights for the Google-Yahoo Cartel:

U.S. marketers do not currently enjoy, but should have the right to:

The new Google-Yahoo partnership to better converge the search and display markets is skating on thin antitrust ice that will only get thinner over time -- unless Microsoft or some unknown competitor somehow starts taking lots of market share from the new Goohoo. 

What are the important takeaways here? 

First, at core, the Google-Yahoo partnership is clearly about trying to snuff out Microsoft as a competitive force on the web. 

In two speeches this week, Google's CEO illuminated more about Google's master plan to "change the world" -- with minimal accountability.

To be fair, I am connecting two ideas from separate speeches by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt this week, that were shared separately but need to be connected to put them into better context. 

More evidence comes to the light that the "neutral-ier-than-thou" Google does not in fact act 'neutrally' on the net itself. Reportedly Google has blocked eBay's PayPal offering from Google's app engine, according to both Techcrunch's Michael Arrington and ZDNet's Garrett Rogers.

• Google's Checkout service conveniently is a competitive offering to eBay's Paypal.

It will be most interesting to see if Google's poodles in the public interest community (i.e. Public Knowlege, Free-Press, Moveon.org, etc.) will jump up and down and scream crisis that a dominant Internet access point, (Google's search engine with ~80% revenue share), is acting anti-competitively and violating the FCC's net neutrality principles, which in fact apply to Google (Check out the actual text in Principle #4).

I couldn't help to notice yesterday that Google CEO Schmidt didn't take any questions from reporters who were in attendance or meet with the reporter pool afterwards, which is customary for speaking venues like Dr. Schmidt's speech Monday at the Economic Club of Washington.

What's Google got to hide in Washington?

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.