Thanks to Mike Wendy of Media Freedom for capturing my 3 minute explanation of why Netflix' net neutrality complaint to the DOJ against cable broadband usage pricing is specious.

You can view it here.

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.

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "Obsolete Analysis Will Doom DOJ's Antitrust Probe of Cable" here.

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Obsolete Communications Law Op-ed Series:

Part 1: Obsolete communications law stifles innovation, harms consumers

Part 2: "The FCC's Public Interest Test Problem"

Part 3: "FCC Special Access: Communications Obsolete-ism vs. Modernism"

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Broadband Usage Pricing Research Series:

Part 7: "Broadband Pricing is Naturally Evolving to Usage Tiers"

Part 6: "Leaf Vision & Broadband Usage Caps"

Part 5: "Consumer Group's Advocacy Hypocrisy"

ICANN is revealing the biggest expansion of top level domains ever.

Given Google is being investigated for antitrust violations on four continents for anti-competitively favoring its own content over competitors' content, and for monopolizing search advertising, the dominant monetization engine for Internet content, learning Google's strategic plans for how Internet content potentially could be reorganized going forward could be... revealing to say the least.

Will Google seek more names than others and why?

Will Google seek to control new domains that could be used to better compete against Google... in other words to create new barriers to entry to competing with its monopoly scale?

Are there anti-competitive conflicts of interest for Google representing itself as an unbiased search engine and owning the registry for entire new domains that cover immense swaths of future content?

Will Google have a new anti-competitive incentive to rank higher content that resides in one of its owned domain spaces over domain spaces owned by their competitors?

Does Google have any secret plans to monitor traffic in these new domain spaces like they had in secretly monitoring WiFi communications of tens of millions of homes in 33 countries around the world without authorization?

In Google's own words...

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "FCC Special Access: Communications Obsolete-ism vs. Modernism" here.

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Obsolete Communications Law Op-ed Series:

Part 1: "Obsolete communications law stifles innovation, harms consumers"

Part 2: "The FCC's Public Interest Test Problem"

***

Precursor Special Access Research Series:

Part 5: "FCC: Forced Access Economics & Selective Math"

Part 4: "Special Access Facts Show More Not Less Competition"

Part 3: "What's the Broadband Plan Implementation Vision? Affirming Competition Policy? Or the Retro-genda?

Part 2: "Special Access Nostalgia for Telecom's Bronze Age is No Path to 21st Century Broadband Leadership"

6 June 2012

Joaquín Almunia
European Commission, Vice President for Competition Policy
Brussels, Belgium

Dear Joaquín Almunia,

Thank you for your May 21 letter sharing your Google antitrust concerns, and for your offer of discussions to avoid "adversarial proceedings."

In this dispute among equals, we would like to counter with Google's concerns about your antitrust investigation.

First, no matter how many times we explain our business or how slowly we talk, your investigators can't seem to grasp the expanse of our algorithmic genius or the fact that our engineers are higher life forms not bound by the laws of man or nature. Going forward we will only talk to fellow gifted engineers.

Second, the velocity of Google's innovation and the fast-moving nature of these markets mean antitrust authorities can't keep up with us. By the time the EU figures out that we have monopolized one market, we will have monopolized many more. Surrender while you still can. Resistance is futile. Get over it.

Compare Google's privacy record over the last decade here with Google's public representations below to determine for yourself if they match up.

Kudos to the WSJ for publishing my Letter to the Editor challenging the central assumption of the WSJ editorial questioning antitrust action against Google because consumers benefit from Google's free search. My letter pointed out a false assumption begets a false analogy and an incorrect conclusion.

The text of my letter follows:

"The conclusions of The Competition Versus Google editorial rest on the false market assumption that Google search users are customers when they are not.  Consumers using Google search pay Google nothing. Consumers are the product Google sells to advertisers and publishers. This false market assumption begets a false market analogy between the Google and Microsoft antitrust cases, because unlike Google, Microsoft's consumers were also Microsoft’s customers. Free market competition and antitrust law excel at serving customers’ market interests, which may or may not be consumers' interests. Incorrectly conflating these different interests confuses the real market forces and problems at work here."

Are the FCC and DOJ paying attention? They say they want more wireless competition. Well the foundations of an economically-viable fifth national wireless broadband network are staring them in the face in the pending Verizon-Cable spectrum transaction, if only they would get on with approving it.

Critics and skeptics of the transaction have an obsolete and myopic view that competition must develop in the way that Congress first envisioned it seventeen years ago in the 1996 Telecom Act -- before the commercial Internet, residential WiFi, broadband wireless, smart phones or tablet computers ever existed. Critics are blind to the technology innovations, competitive developments and hybrid-business models that now are enabling the cable industry to transform into a potentially disruptive fifth national wireless broadband competitor long term.

FreePress' and Public Knowledge's desperate campaign to: discredit competition policy, twist any competitive development into anti-competitive behavior, and block the Verizon-Cable transaction -- can't overcome the obvious facts that this Verizon-Cable transaction is exceptionally pro-competitive.