Conflict of Interest

Listed below are pertinent questions to ask Google at its Google Fiber announcement July 26th, given Google's "launch-first, fix-later" philosophy, and its PR practice of omitting material facts and information. (See the Google-Kansas City Agreement here.)

Google has no shame. This week Google sponsored a two-day summit in Los Angeles entitled: "Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition" and trumpeted Google's leadership in combating illicit networks, with no acknowledgement of Google's own uniquely atrocious track record of illicit network activity, and even worse, with no public acceptance of responsibility or remorse for Google's illicit behavior.

There is no question that Google's professed public goals of combating "narco-trafficking, human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms dealing" are noble, needed and welcome. However, the serious problem here is Google's extreme cynicism and deceptive PR that they can burnish their global brand without having to practice what they preach.

Let's have the evidence speak for itself, because it proves that Google is its own worst enemy, in not doing what they say.

I am in Sao Paulo Brazil for the formal launch of the book I wrote with Ira Brodsky, Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google Inc., which now has been translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market.

The book launch press conference will be webcast live from a top Sao Paulo bookstore, Livraria de Vila, at 10:00 am EST Tuesday July 3rd, which will be attended by journalists, academics, students, and the public who will hear about the book and Google's adverse impact on privacy, competition, and intellectual property.

My presentation will be webcast live at the Portuguese Search & Destroy site, Busque e Destrua, here.

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In May 2012, Search & Destroy was also published in Korean for the South Korean market.

The English version can be found here.

In preparation for the EU antitrust authorities likely Statement of Objections against Google, Precursor has assembled a primer that answers the top-ten most likely and important questions many will have about the EU's action. Please see the primer here.

Top 10 EU-Google Antitrust Questions & Answers

Attorney-Client Privileged Communication

Confidential Memorandum For: Larry Page, Google CEO

From: Google's Mensa Legal & PR Brain Trust

Subject: Recommendation to settle EU/FTC antitrust complaints with a labeling remedy

You tasked us to be more innovative in solving our antitrust problem. We have succeeded. We are now one trick away from absolving Google from all of its antitrust liability.

Our plan is to deploy Google responsibility-evasion algorithm #784923, code-named "Lipstick on a rhino," which our calculations indicate has an 91.265918735% chance of success, given expected temperatures in Brussels, the wing speed of a butterfly in Sumatra, news that Google plans to rank highest, and most importantly the data we have collected and analyzed on the antitrust decision-makers' proclivities and intentions via Google's knowledge of their: search history, website-visits, scanned-emails, wiretapped-routers, hard drive files, DNA sequences, and Google X's artificial intelligence intention-discernment-algorithms.

Many of Google's brightest engineers have read and wholeheartedly support our antitrust-liability-evasion design document, but per company practice none will ever admit to having read it. In addition, a scientific poll of Google's 16,337 PR spokespeople resulted in 102% of them voting yes that they could sell our proposed responsibility-evasion plan to the public.

The Texas Attorney General's civil suit against Google seeking a court order to compel Google to comply with its antitrust investigation subpoenas is sadly just the latest example of Google's growing record of obstruction of justice. The combination of Google's exceptionally long rap sheet and its growing record of obstructing justice documented below, sends the public the message that Google has much to hide.

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.

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?

In Google's own words...