February, 2010

At core the FCC's contemplation of reclassifying, or effectively treating, unregulated broadband info services as regulated telecom services, would be tantamount to the FCC declaring "eminent domain" over private broadband providers, i.e. justifying a government takings of private property for public uses, but doing so "without just compensation" or any statutory authority. 

In the last year, Google has taken almost a third of the search revenue market share that they did not have before -- per recent company reports.

• In other words, Google's search revenue share increased from 90% in 4Q08 to 93% in 4Q09.
• To understand the math, supporting numbers,and links behind this estimate see the end of this post.

Google's 4Q09 earnings release also shows Google is exercising its market pricing power at the expense of web publishers by reducing the revenue share percentage shared with web publishers (i.e. raising prices) because web publishers have no where else to go; please see the illuminating analysis by Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration blog who deserves credit for this important insight.

Most have missed that there's a big antitrust showdown happening this week. 

• February 4th, the DOJ must file a second round of comments on the Google Book Settlement 2.0 with Federal District Court Judge Chin, after Google almost completely ignored DOJ's substantial legal objections in its Book Settlement 2.0 revision.   

The Google-DOJ showdown in a nutshell:

There's new evidence from Google itself, that Google's search results are not neutral, as Google has long publicly represented them to be, and as Google expects everyone on the Open Internet to be.

• (Kudos to famed trustbuster Gary Reback for unearthing the core information that I spotlight in this post; it is from Mr. Reback's friend-of-the-court brief for the Open Book Alliance, which opposes the Google Book Settlement. Don't miss pages 14-16.)  

Google now admits that its search results are not neutral despite longstanding public representations to the contrary.

Ellen Nakashima may have a career-making scoop with her front page Washington Post investigative reporting piece: "Google to enlist NSA to help ward off cyberattacks."  

While Google may be slowly losing the legal battle over the amended Google Book Settlement Agreement, the protracted legal process and Google's political "slow rolling" of the broader process are enabling Google to win the much larger marketplace war for global dominance over digital content and distribution.

• From a big picture perspective, Google is cleverly "playing" and slow rolling both rights holders and the DOJ because Google understands that time is on Google's side, not the side of rights holders or the Government.
• Google's market dominance is only growing and becoming more irreversible, and copyrighted material is only being devalued as long as Google is the only entity that can copy it without permission and currently commercialize it for themselves via search without any compensation to rights holders.   

Takeaway #1: DOJ still strongly objects to the proposed amended settlement (ASA).

FreePress continues to make its own case in its own words that it is a radical political group with a radical political agenda, not a mainstream consumer or public interest group like they publicly claim to be.  

FreePress' co-founder Mr. Robert McChesney, in a February 4, 2010, radio interview reminds everyone how radical a political group FreePress is. 

Robert McChesney: "If we’re going to have journalism in this country, it’s going to require that there be public subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news media sector.”

Google[-AdMob] has come up with another "we think everyone is stupid" defense of Google's anticompetitive behavior: "It's too new to be dominated."

• This new Pinocchio antitrust defense nicely complements its previous grand deception that "competition is one click away,"  and its previous insult to everyone's intelligence that scale is not important to search.  

Google Spokesperson Adam Kovacevich [and AdMob's CEO Omar Hamoui set] up a new "straw man" antitrust problem, easily knock it down, and then presto! conclude Google's acquisition of AdMob is not anticompetitive. From James Temple's San Francisco Chronicle piece:

The Wall Street Journal reports that FCC Chairman Genachowski told them:

• “I don’t see any circumstances where we’d take steps to regulate the Internet itself,” Genachowski said Tuesday, during a meeting with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors. “I’ve been clear repeatedly that we’re not going to regulate the Internet.”

The big open question now is what exactly is "the Internet itself" to which the FCC Chairman is referring? 

Google announced it plans to enter the competitive broadband market and will build out what it calls an "ultra-fast" fiber broadband network that would be available to 50,000 Americans, 500,000 at most.

Given that the purpose of my new watchdog site www.GoogleMonitor.com is making Google more transparent and accountable -- I offer some pertinent questions people may want to ask Google about its new high-profile broadband plans.