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Let’s see what a winner-take-all, market failure looks like as it is happening before our eyes.

The Goobook digital ad cartel is continuing its outsized, abnormally-fast, revenue growth on top of the largest digital ad revenue bases by far. Consequently, their few remaining platform digital advertising competitors are weakening significantly per 1Q17 earnings reporting and other information.

This is how the relevant market players did in 1Q17.

Google (which is 90% digital advertising) grew revenues at a 22% annual rate, or an absolute revenue increase of +$17b to total $95b for the last year.

Facebook (which is basically all advertising) grew revenues at a 49% annual rate, or an absolute revenue increase of +$10b to total $30b for the last year.

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill Op-ed: “HBO’s John Oliver needs a 'net neutrality' reality check.”

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill Op-ed: “Internet giants, not broadband providers, are the top threat to consumers”.

At best the notions of net neutrality and consumer privacy are somewhat in tension.

At worst, they are in opposition, and harm consumer privacy as happened when the Wheeler-FCC subordinated the goal of what’s best for consumer privacy to the conflicting and overriding goal of what was best for imposing maximal, Title II net neutrality.

Net neutrality and consumer privacy are in tension because they are very different concepts, priorities, and approaches for the handling of information online.

However, the original tension between the FCC’s first concept of net neutrality and consumer privacy was very limited because the Martin-FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement on net neutrality was an extension of the Powell-FCC’s “Internet Freedoms” concept of net neutrality, and both approaches were consumer-first, i.e. very clearly centered around what consumers could expect from the Internet.

What thrust them into the more opposing concepts that they are today?

It was when net neutrality flipped from being primarily a consumer-centric principle to an edge-provider centric principle defined by Google, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix; and from the enforcement of a general broadband nondiscrimination principle, to the preemptive imposition of “the strongest possible,” specific, utility rate regulation framework – i.e. Title II of the 1934 Communications Act -- on a competitive industry that had done nothing wrong to warrant it.

Please see PBS NewsHour’s five minute segment here with Gigi Sohn and I discussing Congress’ rescission of the FCC’s unimplemented broadband privacy order that the Wheeler-FCC majority passed last October by a 3-2 vote.

Please see my latest The Hill op-ed: “Congress was right to save consumers from privacy rules imposed under net neutrality.”

Consumer privacy has been the biggest loser from net neutrality proponents’ politicization of privacy.

New Trump FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s keynote speech on “Building the 5G Economy” at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today spotlighted to the communications world that the U.S. FCC is going in a very different policy direction than that of the previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who just happens to be speaking at the same event as a private citizen to a break-out session on “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The fact that they are both at the largest communications event in the world delivering starkly divergent messages and visions, on the same day, provides an instructive and illuminating opportunity to juxtapose their contrasting policy approaches.

Summary: The de facto Goobook ad cartel is quickly crushing its only current online social advertising platform competitor, Twitter. Twitter’s failing business is the proverbial canary in the coal mine that should bring attention to the imminent danger of this apparent cartel to the future commercial viability of the broader online content marketplace.

Practically it means U.S. antitrust authorities’ lax antitrust enforcement has facilitated the emergence of twin colluding monopolies in search and social advertising. The result is a de facto and unaccountable new media cartel, the 21^st century Google/Facebook Fourth Estate, that is anti-competitively destroying and supplanting the original, old media, Fourth Estate, and that is the central facilitator of algorithmic-automated “fake news.”      

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Please don’t miss my latest The Hill op-ed, “Congress Please Undo FCC’s Dysfunctional Internet Privacy Rules,” which explains how these last minute regulations created a confusing mess for consumers.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans formally asked FCC Chairman Agit Pai to close the docket on the set-top box proceeding because it is no longer under active consideration, and because it “remains an unnecessary regulatory threat to the content creation and distribution industries” and casts a “shadow over investment and innovation.”

This is a wise, pro-competitive, pro-property rights, and good government request from Congress to the new Pai FCC.

The FCC should efficiently utilize this decision opportunity to employ the statutory sunset provision in the law to permanently sunset and remove this unnecessary and serious regulatory threat to competition, copyrighted contractual content and its creation, investment, and innovation.