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.”

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).

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."  

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.

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:

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.

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. 

My vote for quote of the month on Google was "If Google can drop China, it can drop you."

This profound razor-sharp insight was said by Howard Shelanski, speaking for himself, not the Federal Trade Commission, at the Free State Foundation's annual conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC on Friday. 

Mr. Shelanski is currently Deputy Director of the Bureau of Economics at the FTC, a former Chief economist at the FCC, and a widely respected economist and antitrust expert. 

I am spotlighting his quote because it sheds light on the broader implications of the world censorship policeman role Google is asserting for itself in the world. 

If Google is going to take the position that it unilaterally will withdraw access to its search engine from hundreds of millions of Chinese, if the Chinese Government does not do what Google tells it to do, it puts everyone else in the world on notice that Google has the power, interest and wherewithal to withdraw access to its search engine to anyone who might disagree with Google politically.      

Google posted "Google's Privacy Principles" for International Privacy Day and made a pretty sweeping official representation to the public in its announcement post: 

• "We've always operated with these principles in mind. Now, we're just putting them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective."   

Is this a factually accurate and fair representation of Google's past and current privacy practices?

If it is indeed a true statement:

If Congress and the Administration truly are focused on lowering unemployment and creating jobs, one of the easiest things they can do is tell the FCC to not kill potentially tens of thousands of jobs by preemptively regulating broadband Internet access to address a non-existent problem.   

Kudos to the American Consumer Institute for an excellent study on the job-killing impact of a net neutrality industrial policy which would effectively chose competitive broadband companies as job losers and much smaller and less job-intensive netopolies as winners. (See summary of study here.)

It is amazing that with one hand, the FCC is working on a National Broadband Plan to allegedly help the nation advance economically, while its other hand is totally working at cross-purposes economically -- pushing proposed net neutrality regulations that would kill jobs.