The ascension of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt to Chairman of the the Board of the New America Foundation puts a helpful spotlight on Google's activist agenda in Washington and the cozy relationship between Google and the New America Foundation.
It's important to note that the New America Foundation is one of the two organizational parents of the "information commons" movement -- in that it coauthor-ed the "Saving the Information Commons" manifesto in 2002 with Public Knowlege, which laid the policy groundwork for a more communal Internet, where Internet infrastructure and digital content are supposed to be "open" "commons" or communally-owned by everyone.
Google is one of the biggest proponents of this "open Internet" ideology where "open" is a codeword for "communal." The Information commons movement has conveniently defined the Internet commons as the property of others that they don't think that they should have to pay for ... e.g. communications companies' networks and content companies' content. (They conveniently have excluded Google from the commons obligation, apparently as long as Google preaches "openness" for everyone else...)
- Google's well known "mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
- What is not as well known is that Google operates like the Internet is a already a "commons" and copies whatever digital information it can find on the Internet with no expectation of having to pay its rightful owner for the use. Many industries vehemently disagree with Google's self-serving presumptuousness and have sued Google for theft.
- In Google's "open" or communal information commons world, it is "unfair" for copyright owners to keep their content from others who want to use it for free however they see fit.
- In other words, in Google's world, "fair use" means they can use and profit off content without having to "fairly" compensate the owner of the content. What a deal!
When it comes to Internet infrastructure, Google's self-serving concept of net neutrality, everyone is treated equally on the Internet -- meaning in practical business terms, Google as the biggest consumer of bandwidth on the Internet by far (via YouTube and their constant "crawling" of the Internet) should not have to pay proportionately for that bandwidth usage -- consumers should pick up the tab for Google's world leading Internet consumption.
- How convenient.
- It would be like the trucking industry saying that their big trucks should not have to pay for highway usage -- because only the consumers of the goods delievered by their trucks should pay for highway usage.
The reason I draw attention to Dr. Schmidt's ascension to the New America Foundation is that there is a very cozy ideology that Google and New America share.
- New America favors public policies which generously favor and exempt their largest funding patron Google, while Google generously funds the advocacy of a policy of communalization of everyone else's property. A blatant corporate welfare scheme effectively laundered under the guise of "new" and "innovative" policy thinking.
- Isn't the "New" America great?!
