Open Source

Google has much to lose in its ill-advised PR and public policy war with Apple, its previous closest Silicon Valley ally.

Antitrust or Fiduciary liablility? Google's recent market behavior puts Google and its CEO Eric Schmidt in a lose-lose situation.

Well informed reports (that Google will not deny), that hackers breached Google's most sensitive software code, the Gaia password system, surface titanic security flaws at Google.     

Why Google is too big not to fail. 

1.  "Bigtable" Storage design: How Google stores and accesses "all the world's information" in and from its data centers is: "'Bigtable:' a Distributed Storage System for Structured Data." It is Google's innovation to maximize scalability, speed and cost efficiency -- not security, privacy, or accountability. Simply, Bigtable is an "all eggs in one basket" approach to information storage and access.

January 27, 2010

For Immediate Release

Contact: Scott Cleland

703-217-2407

Media@GoogleMonitor.com

GoogleMonitor.com Launches Today

Will spotlight Google’s lack of transparency and accountability

While I generally disagree with ZDNet's open source columnist, Dana Blankenhorn's views, I regularly follow what he writes and respect his analysis and clarity of thought. 

Given all the talk of Google's many antitrust issues and Google's own denials that it is a monopoly, Mr. Blankenhorn's candor as a Google ally, was refreshing in his piece: "Open source and the Google Cloud:"  

•  "Google has achieved such economies of scale in delivering transactions and storage that competing with them over the long run looks foolish."
• "Unless you have a breakthrough that can balance out those cost disadvantages you’re really at their mercy. If Google decides to “embrace and extend” its cloud dominance into software and services you’re going to lose."
• "It’s Google’s world, in other words. Open source just lives in it."

Mr. Blankenhorn is on the mark in his analysis. Google's domination of search advertising has afforded it the cybrastructure scale and scope that no one can compete with and that can easily be repurposed to enter into and dominate any digital information or digital distribution business -- almost at will.

Why so many are concerned about Google and antitrust is because of what Mr. Blankenhorn candidly asserts: 

Google posted its treatise on "The meaning of open" designed to redefine the word "open" in Google's image. It is an important read because it is a bay window view into the altruistic way that Google yearns for the world to perceive it.

• Like most all of Google's PR, however, Google's Treatise on "The meaning of open" may be "the truth" as Google sees it, but it is certainly not "the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

I.   Google's  Open Double Standard

Simply, Google is for "open" wherever it does not have a monopoly or dominant market position, however where it does, as in AdWords, AdSense and search advertising syndication, it is closed, to ensure that its dominance remains impregnable to competitors.

In the height of irony, Google has cleverly flipped a concept that was originally designed to be a sword of competition to a closed monopoly, and applied it as a political/PR shield to protect Google's closed monopoly from competition. 

Craig Newmark of Craigslist, a leading net neutrality proponent, posted another strong support of net neutrality on Huffington Post where he shared Consumer Reports definition of net neutrality.

In another tech elite case of "Do as I say, not as I do," it is particularly ironic that Mr. Newmark is publicly championing how important it is for dominant players to not block traffic on the Internet, at the same time, Craigslist, the most dominant online classified ad site in the U.S., is blatantly blocking a new mashup called Flippity and "every single project built on Yahoo Pipes," per TechCrunch's post yesterday:

• "Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes After Dev Shows Craig His New Mashup." 

Why is the FCC changing its current consensus net neutrality principle #4 that consumers are entitled to competition among service providers, application providers and content providers, to a non-consensus principle in the FCC's Open Internet proposed regulations that consumers are no longer entitled to applications or content competition online?

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.

For those trying to better understand some obvious, important and necessary reasons why networks need to engage in "reasonable network management" and prioritize Internet traffic to ensure quality of service for all -- please read a great post by George Ou over at Digital Society. 

Traffic prioritization is not anti-competitive or anti-openness -- its simple common sense network management.  

Jonathan Zittrain's NYTimes Op-ed today, "Lost in the Clouds" ironically captured three of my big concerns/themes about the Internet and its natural outgrowth -- cloud computing.

• I recommend this op-ed because it pulls together a whole host of converging Internet issues that others generally treat separately.
• The problem with writing about these issues separately is that much of the richness of how these inter-related issues interact -- is lost.  

  Zittrain: "The cloud, however, comes with real dangers."

  • I agree. That has been much of the point of my 13 part series since the first of the year:
    • "The Open Internet's Growing Security Problem"

  Zittrain: "Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law."

Google's launch of a new PC operating system on the heels of its announcement ending the "beta" phase for its popular gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk applications, is happening in the midst of a new era where cyber-security has been made a new national priority and internet security breaches are increasingly serious and commonplace.

• All this naturally puts a spotlight on Google's approach to security, because Google is becoming increasingly central to so many people's Internet experience.

An examination of Google's own public representation of its corporate philosophy and design principles shows security/safety is simply not a priority for Google. In many respects, security is viewed as a hinderance to, or a drag on, Google's over-riding goal of speed-efficiency.

In Google's philosophy statement, "Ten things Google has found to be true" there is no mention of the importance of security/safety to Google or Google's users.

#3 point on the philosophy list says: "Fast is better than slow:"