DOJ

There is more to learn from the Alphabet-Google restructuring than Google’s PR narratives.

First for those paying close attention, this restructuring and Alphabet branding should spotlight Google’s truly amazing accomplishments to date, and Alphabet-Google’s breathtaking ambitions going forward.  

At core this restructuring formalizes Alphabet-Google’s very real transition, from a Gcosytem focus of disintermediating and dominating much of the Internet and tech sectors, to a Gconomy focus of disintermediating and dominating much of the rest of the economy.    

In the coming months, Google, and to a lesser extent, Facebook and Apple are on a collision course with American and foreign law enforcement over their pervasive, law-evasive, encryption of Internet traffic by default, which increasingly means law enforcement with a legitimate court-ordered-warrant, cannot search a Google, Facebook, or Apple users’ communications to investigate, prevent and prosecute terrorism or felony crime.

All three, to different degrees, are seeking to regain user trust lost by Snowden’s exposure of ubiquitous NSA spying, by deceptively trumpeting their encryption of traffic as a panacea for privacy vulnerabilities.

[Please don’t miss the summary below of that encapsulates how more pervasive, law-evasive, encryption is not a privacy/security panacea but a grave threat to both public safety and the global free and open Internet we know today.]     

EU officials, who believe normally-big-fines by themselves will be enough to deter Google’s illegal antitrust and privacy abuses, are making a profound miscalculation about what actually motivates and deters Google.

Google’s leadership is not motivated primarily by money, but overwhelmingly by the power and influence of “changing the world” by scaling most every facet of data, computing, and connectivity, first and fastest.

Google’s leadership understands the Internet marketplace is really a simple first-mover race to scale -- and that any fines along the way, without serious limits on Google’s power, are insignificant nuisances.       

Google is unlike any other company EU law enforcement has confronted.

After successfully taming the FTC and the DOJ via the intimidation of politically placing seven former Google executives or consultants in senior positions in most every major federal policy or law enforcement area of legal or commercial interest to Google Inc., Google has turned its intimidation modus operandi on the only American law enforcement arm that apparently remains willing to investigate and enforce the law when it comes to Google – state attorneys general.

A succession of demonstrably wrong and lax antitrust decisions by the FTC has created a 90% market share Android mobile monopoly in licensed mobile operating systems that is anti-privacy by design, because Google’s ill-gotten mobile advertising dominance demands bulk data collection of Android users’ app metadata and private information without users meaningful knowledge or consent.

A Satirical Merriam-Webster Press Release

A Sample of New Google Antitrust-Relevant Dictionary Words for 2015

SPRINGFIELD, MASS., June 3, 2015— Gconomy, Gclipse, Gvolution, Gvil, Goobris and other Google antitrust-relevant words join over 1700 new words and definitions added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in 2015, available now in print and online at Merriam-Webster.com. These new additions to America's best-selling dictionary reflect the growing influence Google is having on human endeavor.

Gconomy – Google’s system for the management and development of the three most important factors of production going forward: information, connectivity, and computing power; or, the fastest growing part of the economy.

Surprise! Google-Android is as dominant as Google search in the EU and much more so in the U.S.

Not only does Google face substantial business risk from the EU concluding Google has abused its 90% search dominance by favoring Google Shopping over competitors in Google search results, but Google’s future business in mobile also faces substantial business risk from the EU likely concluding in its investigation of alleged Android abuses of dominance, that Google-Android has >90% mobile operating system (OS) market share because Apple iOS is not an Android competitor for antitrust purposes.

Google-Android faces much more antitrust risk than conventional wisdom appreciates because antitrust law and precedent can define relevant market boundaries very differently than consumer-oriented industry researchers, investment analysts, or the media do for their particular purposes, which can yield a surprisingly dominant market share in this particular antitrust case.

The latest example of Google’s well-established pattern of callous corporate irresponsibility and willful blindness is reporting by the Washington Post that: “If you search Google Maps for the N-word, it gives you the White House.”

Tellingly, Google’s corporate policy of crowd-sourcing without curation/corporate supervision of Google Maps systemically yields racist labels for innumerable places per Danny Sullivan’s analysis of the pervasive problem at MarketingLand.  

Consider the new ‘smoking gun’ evidence of Google’s “undue political influence” over the FTC, concerning the FTC’s abrupt and unusual closure of the FTC-Google antitrust investigation in January of 2013.

Google’s EU antitrust defense suffers from “Goobris,” a new word because “hubris” is not big enough to describe the behavior of a single company that denies it is dominant in Europe when it commands >90% share of search, >90% share of search advertising in part via Google Analytics 98% share of ad tracking of Europe’s websites,  and 5 of the top 6, billion-user, universal web platforms: search, video, mobile, maps, and browser.