Innovation

FreePress' radical anti-business, anti-capitalism politics lead it to make up or contort facts and analogies in order to promote its world view of a publicly-owned and regulated Internet commons.

In FreePress' latest opposition to the AT&T-T-Mobile merger, FreePress continues to nonsensically analogize this merger with the Ma Bell monopoly.

The FCC's latest arbitrary and capricious torturing of the facts, law, and common sense, in its most recent 706 report, makes it obvious that the FCC is "in search of relevance" and highly insecure about its authority and role in the broadband competition era.

• Apparently, the FCC now sees competition-driven consumer benefits as a threat to the FCC's relevance, role and authority.
  • If the bipartisan policy/law of promoting competition succeeds, then the FCC by definition has less and less to do.
• It is becoming increasingly apparent that many at the FCC don't want competition policy to succeed, because they vainly believe that the FCC can, and should, mandate social outcomes "better" than market forces and consumer choice can produce via competition.

Thus the pro-regulation forces at the FCC are increasingly and proactively seeking to discredit competition policy wherever possible by ignoring and torturing any facts, evidence, logic and common sense that do not forward their government-centric-view that "expert" FCC regulators invariably know best.

Consider the common thread between:

I've long thought there was a big untold story about Google, essentially a book all about Google, but told from a user's perspective, rather than the well-worn path of Google books told largely from Google's own paternal perspective.

• (You can buy the book, Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc. at www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com, Telescope Books, Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Apps, Barnes & Noble, The Nook, and The Nook Apps.)

Given that Google is the most ubiquitous, powerful and disruptive company in the world, it seemed logical to me that users, and people affected by Google, had a lot of important and fundamental questions about Google that no book had ever tried to answer in a straightforward and well-defended manner.

The current media and Congressional interest in the new revelation that Google and Apple have collected WiFi location information has largely missed an exceptionally salient point -- Google and Apple have very different privacy track records stemming from their very different attitudes toward privacy.

Google Privacy Scandal #11:

As the DOJ and FCC research and sort through the competitive facts of the AT&T-T-Mobile acquisition for themselves in the months ahead, it will become clear that opponents' current rhetoric and assertions are over-the-top, exaggerated and simply not credible.

• FreePress and others' claims that this transaction will enable AT&T to "monopolize everything" and reconstitute the "Ma Bell Monopoly," are political demonization arguments devoid of evidence; they are designed to discredit U.S. competition policy, demonize free markets, and justify new FCC interventionist regulation like net neutrality, special access etc.

I.   The Relevant Facts:

There are many major going-forward implications resulting from the DOJ's latest antitrust enforcement action against Google -- this time to mitigate the anti-competitive effects of the proposed Google-ITA transaction.

• (See: Complaint, Competitive impact Statement, Proposed Final Judgement, Order, Release.)

Summary of Implications:

1. Google is clearly the DOJ's main antitrust concern.
2. DOJ is 4-0 against Google while FTC is 0-2.
3. DOJ concludes Google is a monopoly -- again.
4. Remarkably, Google is actively choosing a regulated future for itself.
5. Google is choosing the trajectory of a regulated antitrust remedy long term over the trajectory of a break-up remedy.
6. The narrow market definition is good news for those privately suing Google for antitrust violations.
7. The Google-ITA "firewall" will prove very difficult for the DOJ to police effectively.
8. The complaint mechanism is important.

As reports swirl that the FTC and DOJ may be considering a formal antitrust investigation of Google, like the EU already launched in November 2010, Google continues its deceptive, one-dimensional, superficial, antitrust defense mantra that "competition is one click away," and that Google is only focused on users and innovation.

• It is telling that just last week the FTC charged Google with deceptive privacy practices, and Google tacitly admitted its public deceptiveness and misrepresentation in submitting to the FCC's consent order; so I am not alone here in charging that Google is deceptive and misrepresents itself to the public.

So how is Google's antitrust defense deceptive?

First, Google's stale four-year antitrust mantra that competition is but a click away and Google puts users first, is deceptive because Google knows full well that competition and antitrust involves much more than just users -- as they claim -- but an entire competitive ecosystem.

When the world's most powerful company gets a new CEO for the first time in a decade, everyone naturally has a lot of questions.

• When new Google CEO Larry Page decides to become accessible to people outside the insular Googleplex, here are some key questions to ask Mr. Page about: priorities, management philosophy, privacy, antitrust, intellectual property, and social responsibility.

Priorities:

Three completely different entities, coming from three very different perspectives/motivations, are all making the same charge against Google: that Google forged their work and stole/misused their property in creating its world-leading Android mobile operating system.

Google's biggest-ever reordering of its search results this past week to reward what Google believes is high quality content and punish low quality content prompted an public epiphany this week that Google has the market power to effectively pick winners and losers in the online content market.

• See WSJ's "Google Reorders Web Winners," "Google Search Cleanup Has Big Impact; see AP's "Google Tries to Bury Low Quality with Major Search Algorithm Changes;" and WebProNews' "Google Update Costs Mahalo Employees Their Jobs."

There are two big takeaways from this public epiphany that "Google is the de facto web content market:"

• First, Google's "algorithmic hand" largely has supplanted Adam Smith's "invisible hand" market mechanism to pick web content winners and losers; and
• Second, Google has proven to be a highly unstable, unpredictable and capricious economic platform/mechanism for online content entrepreneurs and businesses to try and build a successful and sustainable business on top of.