FTC

In a remarkably ill-advised and irresponsible blog post, Mr. Feld of Public Knowledge attacked the State Department's Ambassador Phil Verveer for apparently veering from the strict orthodoxy of FreePress/Public Knowledge's view of net neutrality. 

• Ambassador Verveer was merely doing his job and speaking freely and forthrightly that other countries will obviously be watching what the FCC does, given that the U.S. has led communications-competition policy for two decades. 

First, everyone who knows Phil (and I have had the pleasure of knowing him for almost twenty years), knows Ambassador Verveer to be one of the most honorable, wise, measured, and capable professionals and public servants they know, period, full stop.

Wow. The evidence Viacom unearthed in discovery in their $1b copyright infringement suit against Google is surprisingly damning. The evidence shows willful, premeditated, deceptive, and organized efforts by YouTube, Google and Google-YouTube to infringe copyrights for anti-competitive and financial gain.

• Read the quote summary first here, then review the copious evidence/history in the 86 page Viacom Statement of Facts here, and then review Viacom's Summary Judgement memo of law here. 

So what are the broader antitrust implications of all this new and serious evidence of illegal activity and misconduct by Google-YouTube?

First, DOJ really blew it for not even asking for a second request of information on Google's acquisition of YouTube.

A very important investigative scoop by Appitalism's Simon Buckingham (that has been submitted to the FTC's Google-AdMob antitrust investigators) uncovers how Google unilaterally, not-openly, and without advertisers' permission, changed the default settings in all of Google advertisers' accounts, which effectively "duped advertisers out of hundreds of millions of dollars."  

In a nutshell, Mr. Buckingham's investigation found that  two years ago, Google quietly changed the defaults of all its advertiser clients' accounts so that their ads were served not only to all desktop pcs/laptops, but also to all IP enabled mobile devices too.

The FTC is now very likely to file an injunction in Federal Court to block Google's proposed acquisition of AdMob, if Google does not walk away from the deal, given that Bloomberg reports that the FTC is "seeking sworn declarations from Google Inc. competitors and advertisers."    

Thanks to John Simpson's post at the ConsumerWatchdog.org, which flagged this succinct and illuminating 2 min 46 sec video "produced by Hungry Beast, a weekly news show on Australian television puts Internet giant Google's huge ambitions and gargantuan reach into dramatic perspective."

Today's New York Times front page story "Google's computing power betters translation tool" by Miguel Helft spotlights that Google arguably owns and operates "the world's largest computer." The article quotes a Google  engineering VP explaining that Google's unparalleled computing power enables Google to "take approaches others can't even dream of."

Combine the world's largest computer, with the best automated translation capability for most all of the world's top languages, with reports from the front page of the Washington Post that Google proactively sought help from America's top spy agency, the NSA, for its cyber-security vulnerabilities, and it is not surprising that foreigners would be growing increasingly wary of Google and the extraordinary potential power that Google holds over them. 

So what do foreigners increasingly see Google doing?

Will the FTC strictly enforce antitrust laws in its review of Google's AdMob acquisition? Google-Admob is a watershed decision for the FTC given that:

Google announced it was under preliminary investigation by EU Antitrust authorities due to several antitrust complaints filed against it, and it began to frame its antitrust defense against the charges.

• How well do Google's top ten antitrust defenses hold up to scrutiny?  

  1.   "This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company." (Julia Holtz, Google's Senior Competition Counsel, Google Policy Blog post) 

It appears as if privacy is the common casualty of Facebook and Google's competition to outdo each other in forcefeeding a change in society's privacy norms.

The WSJ reported: "Facebook glitch sends email to wrong recipients." 

• If that isn't people's worst email nightmare, what is?  

  This just happens on the day that Google for the first time "has indexed content from the world's largest social network [Facebook] in its real time results" per Digital Beat.

  • Now if you/or Facebook make a mistake with Facebook settings, the world will know it.  

  Newsweek Daniel Lyons got it right in his excellent column this week: "Google's Orwell Moment: On the web, privacy has a price."

Foundem, a UK vertical search competitor to Google, documents serial anticompetitive discrimination on Google's search network, in a data-driven filing to the FCC in the FCC's Open Internet regulation proceeding.