Internet of Things

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, January 29, 2018, Contact: Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

The Primary Beneficiaries of America Nationalizing a 5G Wireless Information Highway Would Be: Google’s Monopoly Information Access, Android Mobile Operating System, & Google Maps/Waze; and SoftBank’s ~$60b holdings in China’s Alibaba & $100b Telecom/Tech Venture Fund

WASHINGTON D.C. – The following may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:

“An analysis of the Axios-reported memo proposing to build a nationalized 5G wireless network makes it clear that Alphabet-Google and SoftBank are the moving force behind it. The proposal obviously would benefit their interests first and foremost and it goes in the exact direction they have lobbied for over the last several years.”

“It is especially ironic and troubling that Softbank and Alphabet-Google are the apparent impetus behind this proposal for a secure wireless transportation network to compete with China and be secure from Chinese snooping.

Every company and industry competitor currently serving and targeting the digital home marketplace doesn’t know they are largely surrounded, but they are.

If one organizes and pieces together the many related things Google intimated at its I/O developer conference last month, especially about Google’s big advantage in conversational AI voice, with what we already know about what Google has already achieved and is doing, what kind of Google digital home strategy becomes clear?

The assembled pieces showcase a discernible big picture of an exceptionally comprehensive Google-Android strategy to try and monopolize the integrated connectivity of home automation (i.e. digital information, products and services) over time via: its strong advantage in conversational AI voice interface, Android dominance, and its proliferating OS tentacles -- very much like Google did with mobile search and search-related information, products, and services in increasingly dominating consumer digital services over the last decade.

Awkward.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager -- who formally has charged Google with abusing its search monopoly, and who also is formally investigating Google’s alleged contractual tying of its monopoly search app to create a monopoly Android operating system -- speaks Friday at the ABA antitrust spring meeting in D.C. on a panel with DOJ antitrust chief William Baer and FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, at the awkward juncture when the EU is escalating its antitrust prosecution of Google while America’s DOJ and FTC apparently are ignoring the obvious antitrust case they know they have against Google.

In a nutshell, the obvious antitrust case against Google is this: the DOJ and FTC have long established Google is a monopoly demanding antitrust vigilance; U.S v. Microsoft settled that a licensed OS market definition excluding Apple is reasonable and that tying a monopoly OS to a strategic app harms consumers and innovation; Google’s contractual tying of its monopoly search to a nascent Android OS is a mirror image of what DOJ already proved monopolistic in U.S. v. Microsoft; Google apparently has monopolized mobile search and search advertising and prompted its only competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing, to give up seriously competing with Google; and now the potential harms to consumers and innovation are escalating as Google is attempting to extend its Android mobile OS monopoly economy-wide to monopolize the Internet of Things.

Wake up world, you’ve been disintermediated.

Google now essentially stands between you and most everyone and everything on the Internet.

Google’s dominant search engine + its dominant Android operating system (OS) + its world-leading Chrome web browser + its uniquely-comprehensive, Internet utility functionality of 193 products, services and tools = a virtual Google “Inner-net” regime.

Google’s Inner-net has practically assimilated most all of what the public open-source WorldWideWeb does for Internet users and much, much, more. And it also has practically insinuated Google-controlled code into a virtual intermediary position between most everyone and most everything on the Internet.

Don’t miss the sweeping antitrust, privacy, security, and EU-U.S. Data Safe Harbor ramifications of Google-Android’s power grab and highly-strategic acquisition last week of Jibe Mobile’s “Rich Communications Suite” (RCS), the world’s leading, mobile-carrier, messaging platform/standard.

Summary

Simply, Google has just acquired the single missing strategic piece holding Google back from being able to centralize the recording, data transfer and analysis of most global mobile communications like it has already centralized the collection, data transfer, and indexing of the world’s digital information.