Ebay

eBay was just found guilty, again, of being a "fence" for counterfeit goods, but nevertheless remains unrepentant vowing to fight against "uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice."

It's taken the Google-led neutralism movement two years to learn, and get on board with, what the broadband industry has been saying all along -- that Americans want broadband deployed soonest, and they want competitive broadband choice.

• That's the real problem that the broadband industry and market forces have been steadily and successfully resolving in the marketplace over the last several years. 

It seems the neutralism movement may have learned that focusing on their manufactured net neutrality problem, and fear-mongering on threats to free speech -- could only take them so far politically.

I wrote the anti-net neutrality argument and Professor Lowell Feldman wrote the pro-net neutrality argument for the ABI Telecom Technology Committee newsletter this month for the American Bankruptcy Institute:

Both articles are copied below, mine followed by Professor Feldman's:

Why Net Neutrality is Unnecessary and Bad Policy

Written by:

Scott Cleland

Chairman, NetCompetition.org -- a net neutrality forum funded by broadband companies Washington D.C.

More evidence comes to the light that the "neutral-ier-than-thou" Google does not in fact act 'neutrally' on the net itself. Reportedly Google has blocked eBay's PayPal offering from Google's app engine, according to both Techcrunch's Michael Arrington and ZDNet's Garrett Rogers.

• Google's Checkout service conveniently is a competitive offering to eBay's Paypal.

It will be most interesting to see if Google's poodles in the public interest community (i.e. Public Knowlege, Free-Press, Moveon.org, etc.) will jump up and down and scream crisis that a dominant Internet access point, (Google's search engine with ~80% revenue share), is acting anti-competitively and violating the FCC's net neutrality principles, which in fact apply to Google (Check out the actual text in Principle #4).

• I won't be holding my breath.  

It would also be interesting to see how Google's poodles spin that this Google content blocking is any different from the instances that they have claimed... threaten... the very future of... the Internet!!!!   DUNDUNDUN....DONNNNE! 

Here is the link to Chip Griffin's 28 minute interview of me on "Conversations with Chip Griffin," an in-depth conversation about many of the reasons why I believe Google is becoming such a big problem and why I personally spend so much time focused on Google.

I believe you will find it an informative, interesting, and entertaining interview covering all things Google, the online economy, net neutrality etc.

• Enjoy!  

The New York Times in it's Sunday editorial: "Joe Lieberman, Would-Be Censor" needs to go back to school on what is "constitutionally protected free speech," because they obviously don't understand the full Constitution or context.  

• The brouhaha here is that Senate Homeland Security Chairman wrote a letter to Google-YouTube requesting that they take down terrorist content "intended to encourage violence against the West." (My first post on this is here.)
• Almost immediately, Google-YouTube essentially stiff-armed the Senate Homeland Security Committee in a blog post that said no to most of their request. (My second post on this is here.)

I suggest the New York Times editorial board and Google-YouTube go back to the Constitution, which importantly protects freedom of speech in the First Amendment, but also makes the Supreme Court in Article III, the essential final arbiter of what the Constitution says and means in everyday life -- not the New York Times or Google-YouTube authority-wannabes.

Please read the brief and to the point editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal on Net neutrality. They understand its a solution in search of a problem.

Remarkably, with all the real and pressing problems in the country, the New York Times Editorial Page wastes ink pushing a special interest potential problem, net neutrality, in its editorial today: "Democracy and the Web."

The 2008 World Competitiveness Yearbook just came out and the U.S. is ranked #1 in world competitiveness again -- for the fourteenth year in a row.

• This ranking by the Swiss IMD is the third major, world-respected, independent ranking that concluded the U.S. is not falling behind the rest of the world in competitiveness.
• These three different independent assessments are in stark contrast to broadband critics' call for abandonment of free-market competition policies in favor of a more regulatory broadband industrial policy. 
  • In November 2007, the U.S. ranked #1 in the World Economic Forum's Global competitiveness Report for 2007-2008.
  • Last year, the Economist Intelligence Unit's latest Global Digital Rankings had the U.S. tied for second in the world.

Bottom line: Pro net neutrality and pro-regulation proponents love to jump on isolated data or studies like the OECD broadband rankings to justify a reversal of free-market competition policies in favor of more command and control government industrial policies.

However, facts are pesky things.

I had to grin when I saw that two of net neutrality top supporters of net neutrality, eBay and Craig Newmark of Craig's list are reportedly in an legal fight and Craigslist is actually accusing eBay of anti-competitive behavior. 

I have to point out two ironies here:

First, eBay has 95% share of the online auction market. Yep, like Google in Europe, eBay is well past the unofficial maarket share level of what it takes to be declared a monopoly.

• It seems as if online unofficial monopolies like eBay are not above leveraging their market power in one market,online auctions, into an adjacent market like the classified ad market.

Second, it is both Craigslist and eBay, who are eviserating one side of the newspaper industry's two-sided business model (ads and subscriptions), while at the same time promoting net neutrality, which is a clever scheme by online monopolies like Google and eBay to effectively prevent broadband companies from evolving into a two-sided marketplace with  both subscriptions and advertising.

 Bottom line: It seems as if eBay defines anti-competitive as what others might do to eBay, not what eBay actually does to others. Ask Craig.