IAC

Pro-piracy interests have been organizing globally to head off and defeat future anti-piracy legislation (like SOPA/PIPA), IP treaties (ACTA) and property rights enforcement, all while claiming to represent "the Internet" and all its users, when they do not. They collectively represent pro-piracy special interests.

They hijack popular political buzz-words like "Internet Freedom" and "innovation," to distract people from their fringe anti-property views and to simulate broad mainstream political support.

("Astroturf" in a public policy context connotes artificial grassroots, simply proclaiming to be something one is not in order to gain broader political support.)

This analysis spotlights the political interests and strategy of global pro-piracy interests. It also answers several key questions:

• What unites pro-piracy special interests?
• Who are the top ten Internet astroturf 3.0 players?
• If this is Internet astroturf 3.0, what was 1.0 and 2.0?
• What's the main difference with Internet astroturf 3.0?
• What are the main political techniques of Internet astroturf 3.0?
• What are Internet astroturf 3.0's three grand deceptions?

Unfortunately, the new Internet Association launched yesterday making several false claims.

Claim: "The Internet Association, the nation's first trade association representing the interests of the Internet economy, America's leading Internet companies and their vast community of users…"

Truth: This "first" claim is unsupportable; several different Internet groups have had similar purposes long before this Internet Association: The Internet Society; The Internet Engineering Task Force; Net Coalition; SaveTheInternet.com; The Open Internet Coalition; The Internet Defense League; The Internet Freedom Coalition; The Internet Alliance; The Internet Marketing Association; The Internet Commerce Association and The Internet Infrastructure Coalition.

Is anyone paying attention to the profound antitrust implications of Google applying to ICANN to become the world's largest domain registrar for Internet Taxonomy 2.0 -- the next generation of Internet addressing and classification of information? Giving the world's dominant search engine -- that is already under antitrust investigation on four continents for favoring Google content over competitors' content -- the additional market power of controlling the allocation of new keyword domain-names which Google would then index for publishers, rank for users, and monetize for advertisers, is an unquestionable conflict of interest and a recipe for more Google monopolization.

ICANN's original Internet taxonomy 1.0 involved truly "generic" top level domains as like .com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil, organized around institutional purposes and around geography to recognize sovereign nation authority like .US, .UK, .JP, .NZ, etc.

Usually one of the hardest things to prove in an antitrust case is anti-competitive intent and motive, but Google’s new CEO Larry Page has made that much easier for antitrust authorities by unabashedly tying and leveraging Google’s search dominance with Google+ in a myriad of overt and covert ways.

To learn Google's "grand plan" and what the Google+ antitrust "smoking gun" is, please read my Forbes Tech Capitalist post: The Google+ Antitrust Smoking Gun.

Since most people focus on how the Internet is changing the world, few focus on the reverse -- how much the world is changing the Internet.

See My Forbes Tech Capitalist blog post to learn the "Seven Ways the World is Changing the Internet."

The likely passage of online anti-piracy legislation (SOPA/PIPA) in 2012 has put a spotlight on the substantial ad-based business interests aligned with piracy and against piracy enforcement.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here to learn why Grand Theft Auto-mated is such big business and so anti-piracy enforcement.

Grand Theft Auto-mated! Online Ad-Economics Fuel Piracy & SOPA Opposition

The Senate's 52-46 rejection of the Resolution of Disapproval of the FCC's net neutrality regulations (after the House voted differently 240-179 to disapprove last spring), is a classic pyrrhic victory for net neutrality proponents in two big ways.

First, the issue put the FCC on the political radar screen of every Member of Congress, and not in a good way.

For several hours the Senate debated and then officially voted on whether the Constitutionally-authorized Congress should be the entity to effectively establish new Internet law, or whether unelected FCC commissioners with no direct statutory authority from Congress should be able to effectively establish new Internet law and effectively claim boundless unchecked regulatory power whenever they see fit.

Supporters of the FCC were put in the very awkward position of politically having to defend a constitutional/legal position that:

• Is strongly contrary to the Senate's institutional interests; and
• Involves preemptive regulation of a major swath of the economy without credible evidence of any existing problem -- all in the midst of a weak economy badly struggling to create jobs.

As the Senate prepares to vote on the fate of the FCC's net neutrality regulations this week, it's instructive to look more closely at the politics of regulating the Internet.

Read my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here.

Pending anti-piracy legislation (Senate: PROTECT IP, House: SOPA) is very likely to become law in 2012.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here to learn why, and why it is important.

Reports that Google is involved in financing a potential buyout offer of Yahoo’s core business indicate Google is playing with antitrust fire.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here to learn why.