June, 2011

Google's deep aversion to accountability was in full view in its blog response to the latest gmail security breach, in which Google placed most all of the blame on users and others, while largely trying to absolve Google of its responsibility and accountability in the matter as the world's largest source of private, sensitive and secret information.

Top 10 Reasons Google Has Culpability & Needs More Accountability:

As a regular reader of Steve Pearlstein's Washington Post's business column, I was dismayed at the consistent pro-regulation frame of Sunday's piece on the AT&T-T-Mobile acquisition: "The Revenge of the Baby Bells."

The hallmark of longstanding bipartisan competition policy has been that if market players have the freedom to succeed or fail at differentiating, innovating and investing to meet consumers' rapidly evolving needs, market forces can maximize consumer welfare much better than FCC regulators can.

• Current fierce communications sector competition on multiple levels, vibrant innovation and massive private sector investment have proven Congress' wisdom in instituting competition policy to replace economic regulation as the best framework to maximize consumer welfare in communications.
• Without the 1996 Telecom Act replacing economic regulation with competition policy, the Internet would be a fraction of the phenomenon it it today.

My new op-ed, "Google's Pirate Side" in the Daily Caller, about the Department of Justice's reported criminal investigation of Google's longstanding promotion of rogue pharmacy sales, despite repeated warnings from law enforcement, tells the story of how this Google scofflaw behavior is consistent with Google's pirate escapades in other areas.

• The Daily Caller op-ed is here.

Google's serial disrespect for people, privacy, property, and the rule of law are core themes of my new book: Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.

The Rural Cellular Association’s opposition to the AT&T/T-Mobile acquisition puts a spotlight on the un-sustainability of the analog rural cellular model that is on the wrong side of broadband change.

• The clear but unspoken subtext of the RCA’s opposition is their recognition that their current subsidized model of rural cellular providers is fundamentally ill-equipped for the competitive broadband era.
• Simply, the RCA is quixotically trying to drag the anchor of an inefficiently and unsustainably subsidized analog business model into the efficient and competitive broadband Internet future – a recipe for losing the future.

Importantly, most of the RCA’s problems exist completely separate from this transaction.

Google's reported purchase of Admeld, described by TechCrunch as "an advertising optimization platform for publishers," appears to be another clever gaming of the antitrust enforcement process by Google to reinforce and extend its core search advertising monopoly.

• Google appears to believe they have figured out their monopolization-extension formula via antitrust enforcement, and are now in "lather, rinse and repeat" mode.

As I explained in formally opposing Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, which I believed would help quickly tip Google to monopoly (which it did) by allowing Google to buy the roughly third of user, advertiser and publisher relationships that they did not have, antitrust enforcers focused myopically on the market of the acquired company and missed the monopolization-extension significance and effect of the purchase on substantially augmenting the core Google search advertising monopoly.

According to the FCC's own hard-to-find disclosure, the FCC does not operate its own broadband "public use wireless 'Hotspot' network" according to the FCC's Open Internet regulations that it mandated for most everyone else.

• Without this link to the policy, one would have to stumble upon the oblique reference to the 4-27-11 "VPAAC Hotspot Network" reference in the FCC newsroom, then click on "VPAAC Hotspot Network" and then click on the button "Expand," then go to the very end of the document, to find the FCC's terms-of-use policy for its public broadband network.

If reports are true that the FCC is planning on claiming in its upcoming wireless competition report that the FCC cannot conclude that the U.S. wireless market is effectively competitive, then the FCC is neither "data-driven" as it claims, nor in touch with market reality.

• Don't miss the latest CTIA assessment of U.S. wireless competition and innovation HERE.
• The facts and evidence are overwhelmingly indicative of vibrant competition.

If the FCC is a wireless competition denier in the upcoming wireless competition report, despite the overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary, the FCC seriously risks its going-forward credibility with Congress, the Courts, industry and the public.

FreePress' latest trumped up net neutrality charge alleges in a complaint to the FCC that Verizon violated net neutrality in limiting access to third-party tethering applications on Google's Android platform, (like other carriers have) -- applications that effectively would enable Android users to bypass standard Verizon data usage plans and improperly consolidate usage of multiple devices onto one device data usage plan.

Evidence continues to mount that Google's management and supervision of its Android operating system is out-of-control when it comes to protecting privacy and security.

• Google's corporate ethos that it is better to "ask for forgiveness than permission" increasingly means Android has no privacy by design and hence less security for users by default.
• Requiring and respecting the need for permission and authorization is a bedrock truism of IT security -- and the evidence below increasingly indicates that Google has a deep aversion to that IT security truism.

Consider the growing pattern of Google's default design and behavior that maximizes collection of private information, which inherently puts users at greater security risk.

One of the simplest and most important FCC reforms Congress could make would be to modernize and streamline the FCC competition report process to stay current with the Internet competition era.