EU

Google will bully most any entity or anyone, if it thinks it can get away with it.

Google just filed a highly-unusual, and exceptionally-aggressive, lawsuit that asks a Federal Court to issue a restraining order to preemptively shut down a broad and ongoing State Attorney Generals law enforcement investigation into Google’s alleged willful blindness to advertising and profiting from well-known, recurring, illegal activities on Google’s platform.

Google is arguing in the UK’s High Court that it is not subject to UK data protection law, in a privacy lawsuit that alleges Google bypassed users’ Safari privacy settings to secretly track their activity. The UK’s Information Commissioner has petitioned the court to ensure that Google is subject to UK data protection law.

In a nutshell, Google is defending its secret collection of British citizens’ private information without their knowledge or permission, by claiming British citizens have no sovereign right to sue Google for Google’s invasion of their privacy in the UK.

The Goobris here would be remarkable if it was an isolated incident.

Sadly however, this heads-or-tails, Google-wins approach is really How Google Works.

Google has no shame. Google is throwing stones at Europe while living in a glass house.

Summary

In response to a non-binding resolution passed by a 384-174 vote by the European Parliament to urge the European Commission to enforce European law against Google’s search engine >90% dominance of the European digital market, Google has advanced three self-serving, America-harming, PR narratives that the overwhelming evidence shows are untrue.

One American bad apple is spoiling it for the whole American bunch.

First, Google shamelessly plays the victim acting like it hasn’t done anything wrong worthy of European law enforcement when Google knows the evidence proves it is a serial bad actor with the worst antitrust, privacy, and property infringement rap sheet of any American multinational in Europe or the world.

The European Parliament reportedly is scheduled to vote this week on a political non-binding resolution urging the European Commission to “enforce EU competition rules decisively” against search engines, i.e. Google.

What is going on?

In a nutshell, this vote has three big effective implications. It is a political revolt and declaration of Independence from Google’s virtual hegemony. It is a rejection of former EC Vice President Almunia’s gross mishandling of the Google competition case. And it is a vote for a European “single digital market” to promote European economic growth and job creation.  

A Political Revolt & Declaration of Independence

Apparently Google hopes to convince the new European Commission to buy into the same market predicate that it convinced Mr. Almunia to accept -- that the fast and ever-changing Internet marketplace has rendered lasting market dominance and antitrust enforcement obsolete.

Like a magician or illusionist, one can make another believe anything if they can misdirect their attention from what is really going on. 

Google’s latest misdirection ploy is to focus the media and the new EC on its new “peak” PR narrative that its search and Android dominance is at a “peak” -- with the implication that Google’s market position is fleeting and will only go down from here because fast-changing innovation and competition will naturally supplant it.

And by extension, if people accept that Google’s dominance is “peaking” then they can more easily be convinced that Google’s dominance could decrease naturally without any government intervention.

This “peak” market frame is clever misdirection because it distracts people from focusing on how Google is broadly abusing its market dominance to extend its market power into additional, adjacent, and nascent markets.

However, a new competitor or innovation can only have a chance to supplant Google, if Google does not neutralize or dominate the new competitor or innovation first.

Dear European Commission Official,

History teaches that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

Specifically, as the new European Commission takes charge of the mess that is the Google competition case, it is important to learn from, and not repeat, Mr. Almunia’s many big Google mistakes.  

Summary of Almunia-Google Mistakes

Please don’t miss my Daily Caller op-ed here: “Will the FCC Break the Internet?”

It explains how the FCC could effectively break the Internet and seriously undermine U.S. trade and foreign policy interests, if it redefined the legal status of American Internet services to ITU utility-regulated “telecommunications” services.

This is Part 68 of my FCC Open Internet Order Series.

***

FCC Open Internet Order Series

Part 1: The Many Vulnerabilities of an Open Internet [9-24-09]

Google executives’ saccharine best-selling book: “How Google Works,” predictably ignores and whitewashes how Google steals to make its free model work.

This piece spotlights the likely “Post-it Child” of Google theft victims and five other theft victims that Google has stolen from using its signature MO or “Google Con.” It also links to another nineteen victims for a total of at least twenty five examples of Google’s theft and piracy. Corporate kleptomania is “How Google Works.”

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information for free. Its business model is to generate ad revenue on only the sliver of information that users find and click on.

So Google respecting property rights – whether it is privacy, confidential information, trade secrets, copyrights, patents or trademarks – would be prohibitively expensive because their world view presumes that digitized information should be free.

Please don’t miss my Daily Caller op-ed here: “Silicon Valley’s Biggest Internet Mistake,” to learn the disastrous international repercussions for the Internet of the FCC regulating the American Internet as a “telecommunications” utility.

This is Part 67 of my FCC Open Internet Order Series.

***

FCC Open Internet Order Series

Part 1: The Many Vulnerabilities of an Open Internet [9-24-09]

History should remember Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s speech in Berlin, “The New Gründergeist,” as the “Ich bin ein Bigfibber” speech, because of his many big fibs about Google’s antitrust and data protection problems in Europe.   

Claim: “Really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon” (not Bing or Yahoo.)

Facts: Google crawls 60 trillion unique URLs to create its search index of the world-wide-web; Amazon does not crawl or search index the world-wide-web.