Google

Please click -- here for the powerpoint presentation: "The public evidence Google violated the DOJ-Google criminal non-prosecution agreement."

Summary

In August of 2011, Google admitted criminal liability for knowingly advertising for rogue pharmacies dispensing drugs without a prescription for seven years despite repeated Government warnings to stop doing so.

To settle this criminal matter in advance of a Grand Jury proceeding, Google agreed in the DOJ-Google Criminal Non-Prosecution Agreement (NPA ) to disgorge $500m in ill-gotten revenues and to obey a two-year remediation requirement designed to deter more Google criminal activity. 

Net neutrality is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s rapidly devolved into a gotcha game -- where if someone doesn’t like something or someone, they cry “net neutrality violation!” and call for an FCC investigation -- under the FCC’s self-asserted, all-powerful Open Internet order.  

Senators and Representatives are now writing the FCC urging it to investigate CBS.com for an alleged net neutrality violation over a contract dispute over how much Time Warner Cable pays for retransmitting CBS programming. The FCC could have a role in this retransmission dispute under obsolete 1992 law, but not legitimately under the FCC’s Open Internet order.

The fact that U.S. senators and representatives imagine that a billing dispute among companies could be considered a net neutrality violation illustrates how arbitrary and capricious net neutrality politics and the FCC’s Open Internet order have become.

Apparently there is no objective, reasonable or predictable standard of what net neutrality is or what a violation of “it” is. That net neutrality has transmogrified into a political-catch-all for anything affecting consumers is powerful proof of how capriciously this issue has been abused.

Why has net neutrality become so capricious?

Google got it right. In a filing to the FCC, Google Fiber rightly asserts that its terms-of-service do not violate the FCC’s Open Internet order and is simply reasonable network management allowed under the FCC’s rules. Mr. McClendon’s 10-24-12 net neutrality complaint is misinformed and groundless.

Please click here for Google-YouTube's Internet Video Distribution Dominance -- Part XII of my seven-year, Googleopoly research series. 

• This is must read for anyone interested in: Google antitrust; Google's liability for willful blindness to piracy and copyright infringement, and the legal implications of Google trying to solve its access-to-quality-video content-problem by acquisition of Dish, DirecTV or a major studio/TV network.

Google-YouTube’s Internet Video Distribution Dominance -- Part XII of Googleopoly Research Series

• Why Internet video distribution competition is substantially lessened;

• How Google-YouTube anti-competitively gained Internet video distribution dominance; &

Almost two years ago, Google admitted criminal liability for aiding and abetting criminal drug sales, by knowingly selling Google AdWords advertising to criminal enterprises for seven years, in a DOJ-Google Criminal Non-Prosecution Agreement (NPA). See the NPA -- here.

Google is the spy tool of choice, the one stop-shop for spying, and the spymaster’s dream.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s famously quipped: “if you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.” Given recent spying revelations, what Mr. Schmidt apparently means is: “if you don’t want to be spied upon, don’t use Google’s products and services.”

Why is that true? Let’s examine the top ten reasons.  

Summary

Google Inc. has a rap sheet longer than any Googler’s arm. See it here. It shows:

• 142 incidents in 13 countries and the EU, involving 6 continents;
• 34 official actions against Google: 1 criminal, 7 fraud, 4 theft, 11 antitrust, and 11 privacy;
• 6 near-record fines in 3 countries;
• 11 nations and the EU have Google under antitrust investigation;
• 11 official privacy sanctions in multiple countries;
• 12 different industries have sued Google for theft; and
• 20+ cyber-security lapses have surfaced in the last 2 years.

This evidence shows Google to be the worst corporate scofflaw in modern American history.

It is timely and relevant given that America’s Attorneys General are meeting in Boston June 18^th to discuss Google’s alleged aiding and abetting of criminal activity broadly. Google CEO Larry Page and General Counsel Kent Walker have been invited to the closed meeting to discuss the matter.

Google is the only company with a mission to organize the world’s public and private information, and it is also unique in having developed more ways, to monitor more people’s behavior, more intimately than any entity ever.

Please see this one page graphic summary to get a big picture view of the almost unimaginable scale and scope of the intimate private information that Google routinely records and analyzes. 

Since all other companies have much more narrow and focused businesses and missions than Google’s unbounded ambitions, they represent a fraction or slice of the whole public and private data pie that Google collects, stores, and analyzes.

Other than Google, only an Orwellian “Big Brother” state would aspire to collect and store indefinitely all private, intimate information on everyone online like Google is doing.

We know information is power.

The problem with Google becoming Big Brother Inc., is that if a state were to combine its state powers with Google’s unique information monopoly, unaccountability, and surveillance powers, it creates huge natural temptations for corruption and abuse in the absence of meaningful competition, strong checks and balances, and real public accountability.

Every system has a most vulnerable point, an Achilles heel. The overwhelming evidence below indicates that Google is America’s cybersecurity Achilles heel.

While America faces a plethora of serious cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Google’s unique scale, scope, tracking, and centralization puts Google alone at the pinnacle of America’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities, in a class all by itself.

Simply, hackers understand Google is by far the world’s single most-comprehensive source of intimate surveillance information on people and their behaviors, while also being the major entity that is least-committed culturally to protecting people’s security, privacy, and property.

Three new Google antitrust developments in just the last few weeks warrant an update to Google’s ominously-growing Antitrust Rap Sheet; see it here.