Open Source

To understand how Google is deceptively misdirecting attention away from their own ignominious record of serial property infringement by loudly accusing its competitors of being anti-competitive for enforcing their patent rights, see my new Forbes op-ed: "Google Asserts Property Rights Are Anti-Competitive."

This is important because:

• The FTC is currently investigating Google for a variety of deceptive and anti-competitive acts and behaviors;
• Google has a history of trying to distract law enforcement from focusing on Google by flinging accusations at others; and
• Infringement of competitors' property rights is arguably one of the most anti-competitive practices a dominant firm can engage in.

Few have connected the dots of how Google's serial mass infringement of competitors' property has been integral to Google's rapid monopolization of the search business and its strategy to rapidly extend that search business market power in most every direction.

Simply, no one can compete with unabashed property infringers.

Find the op-ed here.

Google's deep aversion to accountability was in full view in its blog response to the latest gmail security breach, in which Google placed most all of the blame on users and others, while largely trying to absolve Google of its responsibility and accountability in the matter as the world's largest source of private, sensitive and secret information.

Top 10 Reasons Google Has Culpability & Needs More Accountability:

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.

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.

Popular bipartisan interest in safeguarding consumers privacy in the U.S. and Europe confronts Google with a core strategic problem because Google's targeted advertising business model is no "privacy by design" and no "privacy by default."

• Google bet wrong and big in assuming that since technology made it so much easier to track and profile users for targeted advertising, users would just accept the new loss of privacy and users and governments would never enforce user demand for choice to protect their privacy.
• Google's all-in company bet on openness, transparency, and sharing, was also a strategic bet against robust privacy, security, and property protections.
• In choosing to brand itself as the penultimate "White Hat" player promoting "openness," Google has effectively designed its business, architecture, and brand to be the main "Black Hat" player on privacy.

Google's No Privacy By Design model is unique.

Google's deep aversion to securing the permission of others before doing something that affects them is central to Google's famed "innovation without permission" ethos. Sadly, it is also the wellspring of Google's infamous privacy and security problems.

Where does Google's deep aversion to permission come from? From Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, according to their mentor Terry Winograd, in Ken Auletta's book "Googled."

• "Winograd describes his former students as impatient: 'Larry and Sergey believe if you try and get everybody on board, it will prevent things from happening. If you just do it, others will come around to realize they were attached to the old ways that were not as good.' The attitude, he said 'is a form of arrogance.'"

This week we witnessed the latest high profile example of Google's deep aversion to getting the permission of others.

A few days ago, Google announced that it remotely disabled malware-infected Android applications without the permission of 260,000 Android users who bought or downloaded infected applications from Google's app store.

Mobile content producers do not have a truly competitive choice between Google's 10% fee One Pass service and Apple's 30% fee subscription service, as much as they have a value system choice between Google's Internet commons model and Apple's property-rights-driven market.

• Google's One Pass offering looks eerily like its Google TV offering, where major video content owners faced the platform choice between dumb content and Content is King."
  • Given that choice, content-is-king-oriented owners broadly rejected Google's property-hostile, dumb-content system/model.
• As mobile content providers and carriers threatened with "dumb content" and bandwidth/spectrum commodification from Google's "free" commons model assess their real long term strategic competitive and value-creation options, they will increasingly look toward, and forward to, the nascent Microsoft-Nokia alliance offering and RIM's offering for content-is-king allies and true competitive choices.

As much as Google tries to fool Little Red Riding Hood content owners that their Grandma always had such big eyes and big teeth, most mobile content providers will spot the Google commons wolf in disguise.

Google search executive Amit Singhal exposed two fatal flaws in Google's antitrust defense in an excellent and revealing interview with James Temple of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The core of Google's antitrust defense (overall, in Google-ITA, and in the Google Book Settlement) are two foundational claims:

• Everything Google does is for users and is pro-user -- so tautologically Google cannot be doing anything wrong; and
• Everything Google does is innovative and is pro-innovation -- so tautologically Google cannot be doing anything wrong.

I. Does Google only work for user interests?

Beneath Google's saccharine claim that they only have users interests at heart, is a deep cynicism that everyone is stupid, especially antitrust authorities.

Does Google think antitrust authorities are so stupid that:

The company that has copied all the world's information on its servers without permission and has a mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," ironically has decided to be publicly indignant about the alleged copying of its public search information.

• It is the supreme irony that "glass-house Google" has accused Microsoft of copying Google's public search results.
  • In a blog post Google shared its purpose behind its stone-throwing accusation: "...to those who have asked what we want out of this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop."

It pathetically ironic that Google can comprehend that it does not like to have its own claimed private or proprietary information copied and made accessible to the world for free, but Google cannot comprehend why anyone else would not like Google to copy their private or proprietary information without permission and make it available to the world for free.

Let's review all of the other entities who like Google would "like for this practice to stop" -- by Google.

Could Google now possibly better understand why: