Conflict of Interest

Three times a year the Internet Engineering Task Force meets to discuss and work through major Internet issues.

• To my delight, one of the technical issues they recently discussed has great import to net neutrality and the FreePress petition on Comcast's reasonable network management.
• Kudos to Iljitsch van Beijnum who wrote "Growth of P2P leads IETF to debate "fair" bandwidth use" in ars technica.
  • His excellent article explains a new paper being debated by the IETF that raises the core question, if the voracious bandwidth appetite of P2P is "fair" to non P2P users.

The paper and the article point out that users of "unattended" P2P applications use dramatically more bandwidth than users of "interactive" applications like web browsing -- and then poses the question of whether this excess usage is fair. 

Van Beijnum points out that the paper's authors suggest that P2P users are using 500 times the bandwidth as average interactive users. Moreover, he points out that this assymetric bandwidth dynamic disincents an ISP from upgrading their network because the assymetry would make them even less competitive. 

The fundamental point here is a question of fairness.

The Financial Times reported that One World Trust is publishing the results of a new world survey that ranks Google worst in the world on openness and transparency.

• This worst in the world ranking comes on the heels of a recent Privacy International survey that also found that Google was worst in the world on privacy.
• Now two independent and respected non-governmental groups have independently found that Google is worst in the world on the values that the Google claims are very important to Google: openness and privacy.

One World Trust "conducts research on practical ways to make global organisations more responsive to the people they affect, and on how the rule of law can be applied equally to all.  It educates political leaders and opinion-formers about the findings of its research." 

•  Out of a possible score of 100 Google got a 17. Ouch. Even the math whizes at Google can see that is not a good score.
  • And sense the top performer, UNDP, got an 88, their is no grading curve that will save Google's bacon on this one.

It is good to get additional third party confirmation of many of the themes I have been blogging about for over a year and a half on Google.

An editorial by the New York Times on free speech points out that Google and other big Internet companies in fact oppose legislation that promotes free speech for those who most need it around the world.

• "Last January, Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey reintroduced the Global Online Freedom Act in the House. It would fine American companies that hand over information about their customers to foreign governments that suppress online dissent. The bill would at least give American companies a solid reason to decline requests for data, but the big Internet companies do not support it. That shows how much they care about the power of information to liberate the world." [emphasis added]

It seems all this Google-funded effort to cloak net neutrality as a "freedom of speech" issue by Moveon.org, FreePress, Public Knowledge and other Google-supported pressure groups, is just a cynical tactic and political ploy because Google actually opposes free speech when the rubber meets the road -- like with the "Global Online Freedom Act."

• In other words, Google supports freedom on speech when it benefits Google's business, but opposes it when it does not help Google's business.
• I just wish Google would be honest and forthright about their supposed "don't be evil" principles...  

The New York Times reports today in "Facebook Users Protest Online Tracking" that Moveon.org set up the online petition protesting Facebook's new program that automatically tells your 'friends" what you just bought online.

• I personally sympathize with users who want to guard their privacy -- which is not easy with the new Facebook program.

However, the reason I am blogging on this development is to spotlight the interesting Google-Moveon.org connection here and also Moveon.org's "situational ethics."

Let's connect some key dots:

It will be very interesting to learn if Google and the SaveTheInternet crowd truly believe in opposing discrimination on the Internet or whether they employ "situational ethics" and only oppose alleged Internet discrimination by their political opponents.

• In other words, should net neutrality only apply to network providers, and not application, service and content providers like the FCC's net neutrality principles says?
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    "consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers."

A recent Penn State study:  Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robot.txt, highlights that Google benefits from discrimination against smaller competitive search engines because websites block access to those search engines robots that crawl the web to find what users are searching for. 

Have Penn State researchers stumbled upon a Google-DoubleClick anti-competitive smoking gun?  

PCWorld flagged some very troubling new research findings pertinent to the FTC/EU reviews of the Google-DoubleClick merger by Penn State researchers in its article "Google Favored By Web Admins."  

• Penn State researchers: "Web-site policy makers are playing favorites, and Google is the big beneficiary, say Penn State researchers."

• ""We expected that robots.txt files would treat all search engines equally, or maybe disfavor certain obnoxious bots, so we were surprised to discover a strong correlation between the robots favored and the search engines' market share," said C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State who led the research team that developed BotSeer, in a statement."

 Why is this significant?

I thought you might enjoy the latest evidence that Googlers think of themselves as special, better than the rest of us, a form of American nobility, the elite of the elite. 

From the recent Newsweek article: "Google goes globe-trotting":

• "Google is like Fantasy Land," says APM David Hammer, 24, who hails from Newton, Mass. "You're one of the chosen people." (bold added)
  • "the chosen people."  ...in a Googlers own words.  Hmmmm. I thought that moniker was already taken, and as I remember, it was not self-granted.  
• The Newsweek article continues: "Actually, it's like being one of the Lost Boys from "Peter Pan.""
  • For those of you who didn't remember them like me, the lost boys were immortals who lived in Neverland with Peter Pan... By the way, isn't Michael Jackson's estate called Neverland? 
• The article then described: "At headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Google has 17 no-cost dining areas, each focused on a specific cuisine, including Asian fusion vegan and tapas. There are swimming pools, health clinics, beach-volleyball courts and massage rooms."

This Newsweek article preceded the precious front page New York Times story of today: "Google Options Make Masseusse a Multi-Millionaire."

The British paper, The Guardian, reported recently that: "Google Earth used to target Israel."

• "Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned. Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes."  

• "It is not the first time that Google has been accused of unwittingly abetting the activities of militant groups or terrorist organisations. In January, British officials claimed that insurgents sympathetic to al-Qaida were using aerial photography in Google Earth to locate potential targets inside British bases around the southern Iraqi city of Basra."

What is really scary about this coverage is the chillingly "open" video by the Guardian next to the written story that shows (about two-thirds of the way through the 4 minute video) how the "Palestinian militant" actually targets rocket attacks on Israel using Google Earth -- ostensibly to try and terrorize, kill and maim Israelis within Israel.  

In another similar high profile problem, Google Earth was also careless in releasing restricted photos of the White House roof on Google Earth. 

The plot thickens. Robert Cox of The Examiner has produced another must-read piece uncovering much more detail of the closeness of the Google-Moveon.org relationship: "New questions raised on Google, Moveon.org relationship."

• The piece documents a detailed timeline of the infamous Moveon.org New York Times' General Betray-us? advertisement and then Google's subsequent efforts to help and protect Moveon.org from anti-Moveon.org advertisements on Google. 

What's new and fresh in this piece is the very detailed timeline that connects-the-dots of all of the coverage to assemble a compelling chonology that shows how Google did not follow its own policies and procedures, or even trademark law and practice, in order to censor other's free speech that would be critical of their close political ally Moveon.org.

Kudos to the Wall Street Journal for a highly-illuminating page-one story: "Google under fire over controversial site" because it provides a rare window into the soul of the company who's purported company's motto is "Don't be evil." 

At its core, Google is a "math cult" of mathematicians/computer scientists whose core belief is that most any problem can eventually be solved by one of Google's cutting-edge computer algorithms. 

• Google algorithmic prowess and focus has built the world's best search engine algorithm, with 400 plus variables, and it has also built the world's best online-advertising algorithm business, producing revenue growth twice that of its industry.
• Moreover, Google co-founder Sergy Brin has said the "perfect search engine would be like the mind of God."

A big theme I have written about with Google is that it has a culture of "innovation without permission" which I have translated to mean there are few internal controls or little adult or human supervision at Google.

The Wall Street Journal article provides an outstanding case study of this point -- that Google cares little about the non-algorithmic aspects of technology and/or business.