Innovation

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.

Please don't miss my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "Why U.S. Communications Law is Obsolete" here.

You won't look at current communications law the same way again.

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Obsolete Communications Law Op-ed Series:

Thanks to Mike Wendy of Media Freedom for capturing my 3 minute explanation of why Netflix' net neutrality complaint to the DOJ against cable broadband usage pricing is specious.

You can view it here.

In Google's own words...

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "FCC Special Access: Communications Obsolete-ism vs. Modernism" here.

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Obsolete Communications Law Op-ed Series:

Part 1: "Obsolete communications law stifles innovation, harms consumers"

Part 2: "The FCC's Public Interest Test Problem"

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Precursor Special Access Research Series:

Part 5: "FCC: Forced Access Economics & Selective Math"

Part 4: "Special Access Facts Show More Not Less Competition"

Part 3: "What's the Broadband Plan Implementation Vision? Affirming Competition Policy? Or the Retro-genda?

Part 2: "Special Access Nostalgia for Telecom's Bronze Age is No Path to 21st Century Broadband Leadership"

6 June 2012

Joaquín Almunia
European Commission, Vice President for Competition Policy
Brussels, Belgium

Dear Joaquín Almunia,

Thank you for your May 21 letter sharing your Google antitrust concerns, and for your offer of discussions to avoid "adversarial proceedings."

In this dispute among equals, we would like to counter with Google's concerns about your antitrust investigation.

First, no matter how many times we explain our business or how slowly we talk, your investigators can't seem to grasp the expanse of our algorithmic genius or the fact that our engineers are higher life forms not bound by the laws of man or nature. Going forward we will only talk to fellow gifted engineers.

Second, the velocity of Google's innovation and the fast-moving nature of these markets mean antitrust authorities can't keep up with us. By the time the EU figures out that we have monopolized one market, we will have monopolized many more. Surrender while you still can. Resistance is futile. Get over it.

Kudos to the WSJ for publishing my Letter to the Editor challenging the central assumption of the WSJ editorial questioning antitrust action against Google because consumers benefit from Google's free search. My letter pointed out a false assumption begets a false analogy and an incorrect conclusion.

The text of my letter follows:

"The conclusions of The Competition Versus Google editorial rest on the false market assumption that Google search users are customers when they are not.  Consumers using Google search pay Google nothing. Consumers are the product Google sells to advertisers and publishers. This false market assumption begets a false market analogy between the Google and Microsoft antitrust cases, because unlike Google, Microsoft's consumers were also Microsoft’s customers. Free market competition and antitrust law excel at serving customers’ market interests, which may or may not be consumers' interests. Incorrectly conflating these different interests confuses the real market forces and problems at work here."

Are the FCC and DOJ paying attention? They say they want more wireless competition. Well the foundations of an economically-viable fifth national wireless broadband network are staring them in the face in the pending Verizon-Cable spectrum transaction, if only they would get on with approving it.

Critics and skeptics of the transaction have an obsolete and myopic view that competition must develop in the way that Congress first envisioned it seventeen years ago in the 1996 Telecom Act -- before the commercial Internet, residential WiFi, broadband wireless, smart phones or tablet computers ever existed. Critics are blind to the technology innovations, competitive developments and hybrid-business models that now are enabling the cable industry to transform into a potentially disruptive fifth national wireless broadband competitor long term.

FreePress' and Public Knowledge's desperate campaign to: discredit competition policy, twist any competitive development into anti-competitive behavior, and block the Verizon-Cable transaction -- can't overcome the obvious facts that this Verizon-Cable transaction is exceptionally pro-competitive.

Please see my Forbes Op-ed "The 'ITUnet' Folly: Why the UN Will Never Control the Internet".

This week the EU issued a formal antitrust ultimatum to Google: recommend acceptable remedies or face prosecution for abusing monopoly power. This action has sweeping ramifications and enables one to make several educated conclusions.

I. Ten Conclusions Summary

1. EU has called Google's bluff on being cooperative.

2. Google is busted.

3. "Preferential treatment" is 99% of this EU-Google fight.

4. "Preferential treatment" is Google's business strategy.

5. As a self-declared publisher, Google competes with the web.