Conflict of Interest

I want to thank Mike Masnick for his good comment to my blog post. This post is part of a string responding to Mr. Masnick's criticism of my original blog post entitled: "Google unabashed about gaming FCC auction process to fleece the American taxpayer of $7 billion."

I accept his gracious apology for starting his original critique with an ad hominem attack and I in turn want to apologize to Mr. Masnick for incorrectly assuming that he was on Google's side when he says he has no side -- I take him at his word.

Martin Geddes of Circle ID challenged my estimation methodology in reaching that Google fleeced the American taxpayer for $7 billion.  

With all due respect to Mr. Geddes, first his analogy of taking "a tasty apple, a yummy banana and a mouldy pear, is simply not analogous here. One doesn't pay $4.7b for a "mouldy pear." The regulations did not make the spectrum itself bad to eat, but simply restricted the use of the spectrum or in Mr. Geddes example how someone would be allowed to eat a good pear. People will pay less for a fruit if they are restricted on when and how they can eat it. 

Second, Mr. Geddes suggests I am confusing the American taxpayer with the American public. I most certainly am not. I am recognizing that there is a very specific law, the 1993 Budget Act, which effectively defines that the American public is the American taxpayer because the purpose of these spectrum auctions are to reduce budget deficits. One may not agree with how the law defines the American public in this instance, but that opinion doesn't change that it is the operative law here.  

My estimate in my blog was trasparent and simple so everyone could see how I got my figure.

• The important point here is that Google fleeced the American taxpayer of several billion dollars, was it $7b? $5?b $9b? $3b? -- it depends on the estimating method.
• My estimating method was straightforward, transparent, logical, simple and easy to understand. 
• I stand by it until someone else comes up with a more defensible estimate.    

Many have broadly swallowed Google's "spin" that Google really "won" by losing the 700Mhz auction -- without digesting the serious implications of Google's public admission.   

• So needy to convince everyone that Googlers, yet again, proved themselves to be the smartest people alive, Google hasn't realized that they have unabashedly admitted to de facto gaming and manipulating an official Government auction statutorily-created to fully reward taxpayers for commercial use of public airwaves. 
• Miguel Helft of The New York Times has the best coverage of Google's actions in the auction in his article: "An Auction That Google Was Content to Lose." 
  • “Our primary goal was to trigger the openness conditions,” said Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecommunications and media counsel."
  • The article goes on to explain its nonsensical bidding strategy of bidding against itself: "For much of the first week, Google gradually topped its own bids. With no competitors emerging, anxiety grew."  

So what's wrong with what Google did?  

First and foremost, Google's flagrant manipulation of the auction rules and process fleeced the American taxpayer out of at least $7 billion, by my estimate.

USA Today broke a much under-appreciated and potentially blockbuster Internet security breach story: "Google searchers could end up with a new type of bug." Kudos to Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz, who reported it in USA Today, and also blogged on it at ZeroDayThreat.com, a site for their book "Zero Day Threat" which defines a Zero day Threat as "a threat so new that no viable protections against it exists." 

• In a nutshell, the article and blog post explain how cybercrook hackers have figured out how to use and leverage Google's search engine results "to spread spam, and carry out scams. Typically it also lets the attacker embed a keystroke logger, which collects and transmits your passwords and any other sensitive data you type online."
• This new cyber scam ring is expected to spread rapidly, increasing from a "few dozen major websites" today, to  "hundreds of high-profile websites" in the next few weeks.
• "...in March alone... security researchers found several hundred thousand corrupted Web pages returned in common Google search queries."

Why this is a big deal:

In my previous blog post I flagged a Reuters article that highlighted that Google asked its shareholders to oppose a shareholder vote that Google should abide by net neutrality itself, even though it is the single biggest proponent of mandating net neutrality for all its competitors -- on the planet.

Today I came across a quote in Investors Business Daily's section on quotes, "Wisdom to Live By" and found one that the radically-liberal founders of Google should ponder:

• "Its not fair to ask others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself."  Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady to the ultimate uber-liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Alas, I don't hold out much hope that Google will ever see this as a double standard because they are so committed to Google's Motto: "Don't be evil" and because they like to insinuate that most every other corporation is evil...

If you think I am being "unfair" in labeling Google's founders radically-liberal, check out The Burning Man Festival gathering that Google's founders avidly and regularly have attended.

Per Reuters, Google's board is recommending that its investors vote against a shareholder proposal from the New York City Employee Retirement System that asks Google to commit to abiding by Net Neutrality.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt must have an extremely dry sense of humor.

• He recently told reporters with a straight face that: "We would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft"... "We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be."  
  • This guy could win "Last Comic Standing!"
  • Give him an Oscar! an Emmy! any acting award for communicating that Google's deep heartfelt concern is only for the Internet and its openness.... and of course for "the children," rainbows, puppies, Moms, apple pie and all humankind....
    • Google has now transcended any self interest at all in a Microsoft-Yahoo hook-up... they have become virtual goodness, wholesomeness, and cookie smells.. in all that they do...  ooooooohhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmm......

New evidence exposes that Google has much more serious financial conflicts of interest and is much less of an "honest broker" of online advertising than most appreciate. 

Kudos to Warner Todd Huston for picking up on the outrageous free-speech double standard: "Google-YouTube Yanks Pro-Life Video, Allows Planned Parenthood Vids" that cpicked up on the Catholic News Agency's story that "American Life League video yanked by YouTube."

• The hypocritical double standard here is doubled:
  • Google censors pro-life videos, but not pro-choice videos containing some of the exact same material, with no explanation or justification of this blatant content discrimination based on political views; and
  • Google's advocacy groups make a scene whenever an ISP is alleged to have violated free speech but they go underground and hide when their primary corporate patron and advocacy ally Google is alleged to have violated free speech.  
    • Two. Two. Two hypocrisies for the price of one!

It is the height of irony and hypocrisy that the House Judiciary Committee is having a hearing on "Net Neutrality and free speech on the Internet" Tuesday March 11th and there hasn't been a peep of concern or outrage from all the net neutrality/freespeech proponents, the marauding pack of so-called public/Google advocates that I affectionately refer to as "Googles Poodles." 

Moveon.org, through its FreePress/SaveTheInternet puppets, loves to extol the virtues of grass roots democracy and claim to the press that there is a spontaneous groundswell for their net neutrality views in the "netroots." BALONEY! Moveon.org is a glorified top-down email list of activists, albeit a huge 3 million activist email list -- just like direct mail political organizers before them.

To support this point, I had to share this juicy dead-on insight shared at the Politics Online conference this week, by Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej -- per Washington Internet Daily:

• "If any group was positioned to challenge the two major parties in Internet history, it was MoveOn.org, but strangely the group "didn't want to introduce its members to each other" as a social network, instead simply handing down marching orders, Rasiej said. MoveOn "at least symbolically" checks with its 3.5 million members on what issues to pursue, but it's still run by a handful of people who typically don't query the troops unless they already know the answer, Johnson said."

Remember it was Moveon.org that attacked Facebook, the hot social networking site, when Facebook spurned Google for Microsoft. See my previous post:  "Google's poodle -- Moveon.org is leading the privacy protest against Facebook -- which spurned Google..."