The evidence mounts that Google is increasingly throwing its monopoly weight around anti-competitively without much apparent fear of antitrust enforcement. This Google antitrust update will spotlight:

1. New evidence of Google's unfettered "kingmaking" power (lack of search neutrality) to anti-competitively self-deal with highest search rankings and sabotage competitors' rankings;
2. Google's latest anti-competitive pattern of behavior, i.e. Google's wholesale-retail vertical squeeze play; and
3. Why the antitrust risk Google faces comes from the EU and the DOJ, not from the FTC.   

I. Latest Evidence of Google's Anti-competitive Search Discrimination:

Google's behavior continues to raise serious antitrust concerns about whether Google's dominant search business is treating competitors neutrally as it claims, or whether it is anti-competitively picking itself and its partners as content winners and its competitors as content losers. 

Viacom is likely to ultimately prevail in its appeal of the lower Court decision in the seminal Viacom vs. Google-YouTube copyright infringement case.

• If one only reads either the lower court's decision or the press reports of it, without considering likely appellate arguments and the broader constitutional context of copyright protection, it is easy to missread the likely ultimate outcome here. 
• Both sides agreed to an expedited summary judgment process in the lower court, because both sides fully expected this case to ultimately be decided at the appellate level, and most likely by the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Expect the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to decide Viacom's appeal in 2011 and the Supreme Court to likely take the case and decide it in 2012 -- given how central this case is to maintaining copyright protection in the Internet age.

Why is Viacom likely to prevail on appeal?

Has Mr. Masnick of techdirt fame joined Google's legendary PR team as its go to apologist in the blogosphere?

For anyone wanting to better understand the big picture threat to our Nation's communications and media infrastructure/business models, please don't miss Randy May's outstanding post: "Not Mao Zedong or a communist... but a Socialist."

Building on the great foundation of work laid down by Adam Theirer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation in this area, Randy adds another laser spotlight on how there are powerful ideological forces championed by FreePress' leader Robert McChesney that seek ultimate government control of both the media and the communications infrastructure. 

The disturbing common thread here that deserves much more attention from freedom-loving people everywhere, is the deeply (and scarily successful) anti-free-enterprise, anti-property, anti-individual-freedom efforts by FreePress in promoting a de facto government takeover of both the media and broadband communications infrastructure.   

Clearly proponents of net neutrality and public-utility regulation of broadband, have learned how to manipulate language and metaphors to mask and move their agenda; what they haven't learned is that the language and metaphors used to promote policy changes must be true in order to make legitimate, successful, and lasting public policy.

• The communications plan for the FCC's proposed broadband regulation of the Internet is full of fiction, fantasy and misdirection.
• What's increasingly obvious is that proponents of preemptive proscriptive broadband regulation think people are stupid, that they don't know what words mean, and that they will gullibly swallow whatever is said without thought or question.
• Broadband regulation proponents are fantastically claiming that:
  • An obviously heavy-handed regulatory approach is really a "light touch;"
  • The FCC's most extreme and sweeping regulatory proposal ever is really just a "middle ground" compromise;
    

Mr. Masnick of techdirt fame is putting his head in the sand, just like an ostrich does, in hopes that the danger of "search neutrality" will somehow go away as long as he manages to not see or hear anything about it.

• Mr. Masnick's head-in-the-sand stance is in full public view in his latest full-throated defense of Google: 
  • "There Is No Such Thing As Search Neutrality, Because The Whole Point Of Search Is To Recommend What's Best"
• Since Mr. Masnick's mind is obviously made up, let me present some information and evidence for those who remain open-minded to what is actually happening in the marketplace -- concerning the lack of Google search neutrality.

First, none other than Google's founders railed against advertising causing "insidious" bias in search results -- in their famous Stanford paper on search engines -- see Appendix A. 

With due credit to "Ripley's Believe it or Not!^®," so much odd and bizarre is happening at the FCC in the "name" of "broadband" that the topic calls for its own collection of: "Believe it or Not!^®" oddities.

The FCC insists that its Title II reclassification effort to regulate broadband networks is not "regulating the Internet," when the law, the Supreme Court and the FCC  all define the Internet to include broadband networks! 

The FCC, certain that the D.C. Circuit Court decision on Comcast vs. the FCC was incorrect, decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court!

Google has much to lose in its ill-advised PR and public policy war with Apple, its previous closest Silicon Valley ally.

Antitrust or Fiduciary liablility? Google's recent market behavior puts Google and its CEO Eric Schmidt in a lose-lose situation.

At its Thursday meeting, expect the FCC to adopt Google's PR script to try and better sell the FCC's upcoming "Extreme Makeover" of Internet regulation.

• The centerpiece of the FCC and Google's "extreme Internet makeover" plan is the creation of an entirely new, Google-inspired, regulatory classification called "Broadband Internet Connectivity Service" or BICS.
• The BICS extreme makeover is designed to:
  • Enable the promotion of integrated "edge" products and services like Google Voice, Google TV, and Google's Chrome/Android operating systems; and
  • Empower the FCC to implement its National Broadband Plan on its own without additional Congressional authorization or action. 

Predictably, the FCC's Google-oriented-BICS-scheme has three fatal flaws -- making it a disaster waiting to happen.