Conflict of Interest

Since the EU-Microsoft settlement now will allow users to select an Internet browser from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera among others, the next relevant competitive issue with browsers is if the browsers themselvesa are operating clandestinely in an anti-competitive or closed way.

• In other words, whether or not browsers are non-neutral and divert the user somewhere against the user's expressed choice. 

As I have discussed before, Google's Chrome is not an Internet browser, but a gateway to Google's datacenter to browse Google's mirror copy of the Internet and track the user's every movement. 

Google's mission to organize the world's information also increasingly makes Google the World's self-appointed Supreme Information Authority. When politics, facts, science, whatever... are in dispute... Google's engineers and secret algorithms will provide the world with the answer, the "truth." 

Who needs a society of Cartographers when there literally is:

• "The World According to Google."
  • See Google's latest post to see where Google is taking the world's information and the world's boundaries.  

The big implication of all this is why will there need to be any non-Google input into how the world's information is organized when Google's all-knowing engineering elite can much more efficiently decide for us all?

• Information may be power, but Google assures the world that Google, would never would take sides on any type of information dispute... or could they?
• Wait a minute isn't a ranking implicitly taking sides on what is the best information and what is not?
• The subtext here is don't get on the wrong side of Google, or your information may get sent to "the back of the arena," as one Google Sr. VP so aptly put it in a prominent Google blog post.

Google's secret algorithm discriminates in favor of The New York Times per a Politico video interview with Ken Auletta, author of the new book: "Googled, the End of the World as We Know It."

Mr. Auletta explains what he learned about Google's secret search algorithm. It favors sites/results based on "wisdom of the crowds" (i.e. most traffic or links), but it also favors authoritative sites like the New York Times, because Google grants them extra ratings points that elevate them in Google's search results.  

• Mr. Auletta goes on to defend Google for keeping the algorithm and the extra ratings points secret in order to prevent others from gaming the system. 

This information that Google proactively and specifically discriminates in favor of certain content over other content is a big deal for several reasons.

First, Google has long represented that it is a neutral algorithm where Internet users determine what ranks highest in searches, or in other words what content gets found and read and what doesn't.

1.   Why has Google been so hostile to protecting brand trademarks that companies have had to resort to suing Google to get any satisfactory brand respect?  

2.   Why is Google's Chrome browser so hostile to brand-marketing? 

• If a user types in a company brand name as a www. ... .com URL into Chrome's "Omnibox," Google's browser always takes the user to Google's copy of the website first and not to the requested company's branded website where the brand-company can benefit from the visit or click-thru information that their brand advertising has earned.
  • In other words, is Google leveraging its fast-growing, Chrome browser technology, used by 30 million people, to become a gatekeeper for harvesting branding online? 

3.   Why is Google's  AdWords "Quality Score" policy so hostile to online brand marketing? 

• Google's Adwords quality-score policy rewards fast-loading sites and punishes slow-loading landing pages, which are inherently slower because they rely on display/rich-media brand-building advertising. 
• If brand destinations become weaker online, would advertisers then have to depend on Google more to be discovered on the Internet?     

4.   Why does Google publicly deny that it works for advertisers... which generate 97% of Google's revenues? Is Google somehow not proud of advertising or their advertisers?

After discussing whether Google should buy the New York Times, Google decided against it because it "would damage its 'neutral' identity", per Ken Auletta's just-published book "Googled: The End of The World as We know It." 

• Google has long claimed to be neutral. Their corporate philosophy statement claims: "We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust."  
• As the world-leading corporate proponent of an industrial policy to mandate net neutrality for all its potential broadband competitors in cloud computing, and as the beneficiary of "The Google Loophole" in the FCC's proposed open Internet regulations (para 104), it is fair to stress test whether Google's claim of a "neutral' identity is true or just cleverly-executed PR.

Is Google Neutral?

First, by the standards of Google's own co-founders, Google's search advertising model is not neutral.

Google responded to the FCC's questions that effectively address whether or not Google Voice should be subject to the FCC's proposed net neutrality regulations.

In a nutshell, Google basically asserted that it is acceptable for a benevolent provider of free services like Google Claus to discriminate and block calls as an information service voice provider, but it is unaccceptable for profit-seeking broadband voice and information service providers to discriminate or block calls.

Google again has blocked search advertising that promotes political views that Google does not share.

• On the morning of the FCC's net neutrality vote last week, Bret Glass of ExtremeTech.com tried to advertise his white paper, that advocated a light regulatory touch, on Google Adwords only to find that Google blocked his ad as not meeting their "guidelines." (See Mr. Glass' full recounting of this non-neutral content blocking incident at the end of this post.) 
  • This is not the first time Google has blocked content that did not comport with Google's political/policy agenda. For example, Google blocked anti-Moveon.org ads proposed by a U.S. Senator's campaign.

The "relevance" of this evidence of net neutrality violations by Google, to the FCC's just-proposed net neutrality regulations, is that the FCC's clearly stated purposes are: to prevent companies with market power from infringing on free speech and to ensure that those with market power are transparent about their market practices that affect the free flow of information. 

I kid you not. Google's latest antitrust defense, from the mouth of Dana Wagner, Google's lead antitrust lawyer, is: "We want to be Santa Claus. We want to make lots of toys that people like playing with. But if you don't want to play with our toys, you've got us."

• See the quote for yourself at the very end of a Globe and Mail article entitled: "Google: we're not evil and we're not a monopoly either."
  • Google's Mr. Wagner continues: “In a West Coast company run by engineers, I don't think there was much attention paid to being in Ottawa, being in D.C. and telling your story,” Mr. Wagner says. “If you don't tell your story, other people do it for you.”

Let me attempt to unpack the irony of this new story/metaphor of which Google has taken ownership. 

Most companies when they tell their corporate "story" try to "put their best foot forward," but no one but Google would think to try and slip jolly megalomaniacal corpulence down the narrow chimney of public credibility.  

Only Google would have so little real-world self-awareness as to choose to wrap itself in the beloved mythical role of Santa Claus who has the unique power to decide who has been good or "evil" during the last year, and the unique power to reward those who have been "good" in Google's eyes with toys and punish those who have been "evil" with coal in their stocking. 

Only Google would think it was good PR to allude to Google's secret search algorithms and auction "quality scores" as a worldwide "naughty and nice" list.

Pasted below is a copy of Google News listing from today that highlights only a very Google-friendly quote from Gigi Sohn in a slew of articles that are tough on Google's top public policy priority -- net neutrality.

• Is this coincidence?
• Is this a one time instance or mistake?
• Or is Google using Google News as an undisclosed advocacy arm of Google?
• It certainly wouldn't be neutral or transparent if Google is using Google News to promote its side of a pet and controversial public policy priority without any disclosure... 

I wonder what Google's explanation of this potential problem is... or if anyone at the FCC is interested in learning more about how Google programs its Google News algorithm...

I posted the comment below on the Washington Post's IT blogpost where FreePress urged the the Post to disclose its financial interests in cable systems.

FreePress hounds any voice that doesn't support 'net neutrality'  regulation to disclose their financial interests, like they did with urging the Washington Post to disclose that they owned cable systems in their editorial opposing net neutrality. I agree they should have disclosed, but I don’t agree that disclosure is only important for net neutrality opponents, but not for proponents like FreePress and its allies. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.   

FreePress has frequently attacked me as a shill and Astroturf. They ignore that I openly, unabashedly, and regularly disclose that my firm Precursor LLC is an industry consulting firm that works for companies and that I am Chairman of NetCompetition.org which is funded by broadband interests. It is not news that I strongly agree with the broadband sector view that markets produce better outcomes for consumers than regulation.