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The proposed FTC-Google privacy settlement of EPIC's privacy complaint has many important, surprising, and far-reaching implications.

• (FYI: FTC Release, FTC Complaint, proposed Consent Order, Rosch concurrence, Google statement.)

I applaud the FTC for taking Google's privacy misrepresentations and deceptions so seriously and look forward to the FTC rigorously enforcing this landmark consent order.

Summary of Takeaways:

Why is there a selective political fixation on AT&T-T-Mobile's ~43% combined market share when so many related markets are dramatically more concentrated, less competitive, or even monopolized?

• This blatant competition double standard originates from the political agenda of the FreePress/Silicon Valley net neutrality regulatory complex that seeks a broadband industrial policy -- to create an information commons and generate tens of billions of dollars in implicit bandwidth subsidies for Silicon Valley special interests.

When the FCC does the "data-driven analysis" that it claims to value, it will discover a blatant competition double standard where broadband critics gerrymander and torture broadband market share statistics to raise the specter of a broadband "opoly" -- to justify broadband regulation.

• It is telling that opponents have to bring Verizon, which has nothing to do with the AT&T-T-Mobile transaction, into the equation in order to manufacture market shares of concern.
• The outrageous and unsubstantiated implication of opponents' "Ma Bell duopoly" narrative here is that broadband competitors will anti-competitively collude, when all the evidence is that Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Metro PCS, Leap Wireless and others compete fiercely and relentlessly in multiple dimensions: price, value, device choice, quality, technology, plans, and innovation.

It will be surprising if the Republican FCC Commissioners and a bipartisan majority of Congress do not oppose the FCC's unwarranted war on wireless competition policy.

• The FCC appears to be itching to start another political battle over competition policy with its upcoming fifteenth wireless competition report to Congress, by making another political decision devoid of supporting evidence or merit, that the wireless market does not have "effective competition."
  • Such a fantastical political finding, helps the FCC to ignore Congress and the law yet again, and also to unilaterally impose new sweeping economic regulations on wireless, including net neutrality.

The linchpin of the FCC's de-competition policy to restore the FCC to its pre-1996 monopoly regulation glory days, and to put the FCC in more control of the communications sector going forward, is to politically define away the existence of "effective competition," in order to justify FCC regulation of the mobile Internet.

Expect privacy concerns to be the eventual catalyst that ultimately bursts the Internet investment Bubble 2.0. It is rare when there is a profound disconnect and suspension of reality between industry behavior/investment expectations and customer wants, needs and expectations, but that is precisely what is at work in Bubble 2.0.

• Almost by definition, investment bubbles are unsustainable; what goes up must come down, it is only a matter of how and when -- not if.
• Simply what fuels Bubble 2.0  is the patently false core assumption that the current unfettered, widespread, and largely clandestine data mining of individuals private information in order to target specific individuals with personalized online advertising:
  • Is aligned with real user interests;
  • Is a forthright business practice consumers are aware of and have meaningfully consented to;
  • Will not be legally constrained in the future; and
  • Will become the accepted norm -- meaning that the populace and governments will adapt to the wishes and desires of the online-ad- industry and not the other way around.
• In a word, is online tracking, profiling and data mining a consumer-driven model? -- or a consumer-dragged model?

This is deja vu for me. I've seen this movie before when I had a front row seat as the original dotcom Bubble 1.0 wiped away $4 trillion in market valuation in a few weeks.