January, 2012

Important free market communications legislation introduced in mid-December warrants flagging because it brings needed attention to a real and growing problem, how obsolete communications law stifles innovation, growth and consumer benefit.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post on the DeMint-Scalise bill, “The Next Generation Television Marketplace Act.”

Google’s recent ~$1b 3-year deal with Mozilla for Google to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox browser users, which comprise over a quarter of the global browser/search market, has much broader and more serious antitrust implications for Google’s already very tenuous antitrust situation than most everyone appreciates.

• Please see my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here to learn why the "Google-Firefox Search deal is Antitrust Red Meat."

Since most people focus on how the Internet is changing the world, few focus on the reverse -- how much the world is changing the Internet.

See My Forbes Tech Capitalist blog post to learn the "Seven Ways the World is Changing the Internet."

Usually one of the hardest things to prove in an antitrust case is anti-competitive intent and motive, but Google’s new CEO Larry Page has made that much easier for antitrust authorities by unabashedly tying and leveraging Google’s search dominance with Google+ in a myriad of overt and covert ways.

To learn Google's "grand plan" and what the Google+ antitrust "smoking gun" is, please read my Forbes Tech Capitalist post: The Google+ Antitrust Smoking Gun.

At CES, the FCC signaled that it opposed any effort by Congress to give the FCC policy direction or to establish any checks and balances on the FCC in authorizing incentive auctions of prime TV broadcast spectrum.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post "FCC Seeks Unbounded Spectrum Auction Authority" to see why the the FCC's lack of regulatory humility here is so stunning.

Systematic theft may be the most anti-competitive and monopolistic practice in which a company can engage.

The evidence indicates Google owes much of its success and rapidly spreading market dominance to the ill-gotten unbeatable competitive advantage of systematic theft of others property (trademarks, copyrights, patents, trade secrets, contact lists, & private information) via at least eight distinct patterns of theft perpetrated over several years time -- that collectively indicate that Google’s anti-competitive behavior is systematic, willful and strategic.

For the evidence, see my Forbes Tech Capitalist post: The Evidence Google's Systematic Theft is Anti_Competitive.

Google led, orchestrated, politically-framed and set the political tone for much of the Web’s opposition to pending anti-piracy legislation, SOPA/PIPA, because rule of law and effective enforcement of property rights online represent a clear and present danger to Google’s anti-property-rights mission, open philos

Reports that “Twitter Can Censor by Country” is a perfect example of how the world is changing the Internet. Change is a two-way street. Conventional wisdom that only assumes the Internet is changing the world risks being blind-sided by the Internet’s underappreciated exa-trend: how the world is changing the Internet.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post: "Twitter Realpolitik & the Sovereignization of the Internet" to learn about Twitter's new realpolitik and how sovereign powers will increasingly be asserting themselves vis a vis the Internet.

Why are market forces so weak in protecting users’ online privacy?

The main reason is that the online marketplace is economically structured around users being a commodity, data, to be aggregated and mined, not customers to be served and protected in a competitive marketplace. That’s because the overriding economic force that created the free and open commercial Internet – the predominant Silicon Valley venture capital/IPO value creation model – was and remains largely antithetical to protecting online privacy.

The Silicon Valley venture capital/IPO driven model is laser-focused on achieving Internet audience/user scale fastest in order to gain first-mover advantage and then rapid dominance of a new product or service segment. This predominant Internet economic model is predicated on a precious few investments achieving such rapid user scale that it: warrants a buy-out at an enormous premium multiple; enables fast and exceptionally-profitable liquidity (via the new secondary derivative market for private venture shares or employee options); or broad liquidity via a public IPO.