Copyright

Netflix' continues to exhibit serious difficulties grasping basic economics, competition and value.

First, Netflix is lowering its value to customers.

• Netflix now charges its subscribers' 60% more in September in return for lots less premium content available for subscribers in February, as Netflix just lost Starz,its top premium content provider, which supplies 22 of Netflix' top 100 movies.

Second, Netflix is shifting its costs to its customers.

• Netflix used its abrupt and controversial 60% price hike to force many of its core users away from the DVD model that many prefer and have the viewing technology for (but costs Netflix more), to the streaming model, (which Netflix prefers because it costs them less) even if it costs many of their DVD customers to spend lots more to upgrade their viewing technology to view the streamed content in the way they can currently view DVDs.

Third, Netflix is chasing away the premium content its subscribers demand.

To understand how Google is deceptively misdirecting attention away from their own ignominious record of serial property infringement by loudly accusing its competitors of being anti-competitive for enforcing their patent rights, see my new Forbes op-ed: "Google Asserts Property Rights Are Anti-Competitive."

This is important because:

• The FTC is currently investigating Google for a variety of deceptive and anti-competitive acts and behaviors;
• Google has a history of trying to distract law enforcement from focusing on Google by flinging accusations at others; and
• Infringement of competitors' property rights is arguably one of the most anti-competitive practices a dominant firm can engage in.

Few have connected the dots of how Google's serial mass infringement of competitors' property has been integral to Google's rapid monopolization of the search business and its strategy to rapidly extend that search business market power in most every direction.

Simply, no one can compete with unabashed property infringers.

Find the op-ed here.

FreePress co-founder and collectivist ideologue, Robert McChesney, wrote his latest Internet manifesto: "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism," in the Monthly Review - An Independent Socialist Magazine."

McChesney's collectivist and elitist manifesto warrants attention because it is widely disseminated to:

My new op-ed, "Google's Pirate Side" in the Daily Caller, about the Department of Justice's reported criminal investigation of Google's longstanding promotion of rogue pharmacy sales, despite repeated warnings from law enforcement, tells the story of how this Google scofflaw behavior is consistent with Google's pirate escapades in other areas.

• The Daily Caller op-ed is here.

Google's serial disrespect for people, privacy, property, and the rule of law are core themes of my new book: Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.

• See www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com for the different ways you can buy the book.

My new Forbes' op-ed: Google Disregards the Law, tells the sordid story behind today's story of Google apparently agreeing to settle a criminal investigation with the Department of Justice for ~$500m for promoting and accepting advertising from illegal online pharmacies.

• The op-ed sadly chronicles that this latest law-breaking by Google is part of a well-established pattern of disregard for the rule of law.
• If one cannot trust a public Fortune 100 company to obey the law, one cannot trust them overall as I explain in much great detail in my new book "Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc."
  • See: www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com for the different ways you can buy the book.

I've long thought there was a big untold story about Google, essentially a book all about Google, but told from a user's perspective, rather than the well-worn path of Google books told largely from Google's own paternal perspective.

• (You can buy the book, Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc. at www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com, Telescope Books, Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Apps, Barnes & Noble, The Nook, and The Nook Apps.)

Given that Google is the most ubiquitous, powerful and disruptive company in the world, it seemed logical to me that users, and people affected by Google, had a lot of important and fundamental questions about Google that no book had ever tried to answer in a straightforward and well-defended manner.

Ironically Google's new "Copyright School" to better educate YouTube users of copyright law and responsibilities, slides Google down the slippery slope of tacitly admitting liability for copyright infringement in Viacom's billion dollar infringement suit against Google-YouTube.   (See Politico's story.)

There are two big takeaways from Google's new "Copyright School."

First, Google continues to basically blame users for copyright infringement while absolving itself of mass facilitation of copyright infringement.

The big open question here is does Google have a "copyright school" for its YouTube engineers/employees and have any of them attended it?

• It is telling that whenever the company that claims to work for users, gets in trouble, its users' fault not Google's.
• (Doesn't this sound eerily like Google implying Google's China's security breach was the fault of users not being careful enough?)

Second, why didn't Google do this shortly after it bought YouTube over three years ago?

When the world's most powerful company gets a new CEO for the first time in a decade, everyone naturally has a lot of questions.

• When new Google CEO Larry Page decides to become accessible to people outside the insular Googleplex, here are some key questions to ask Mr. Page about: priorities, management philosophy, privacy, antitrust, intellectual property, and social responsibility.

Priorities:

Three completely different entities, coming from three very different perspectives/motivations, are all making the same charge against Google: that Google forged their work and stole/misused their property in creating its world-leading Android mobile operating system.

Mobile content producers do not have a truly competitive choice between Google's 10% fee One Pass service and Apple's 30% fee subscription service, as much as they have a value system choice between Google's Internet commons model and Apple's property-rights-driven market.

• Google's One Pass offering looks eerily like its Google TV offering, where major video content owners faced the platform choice between dumb content and Content is King."
  • Given that choice, content-is-king-oriented owners broadly rejected Google's property-hostile, dumb-content system/model.
• As mobile content providers and carriers threatened with "dumb content" and bandwidth/spectrum commodification from Google's "free" commons model assess their real long term strategic competitive and value-creation options, they will increasingly look toward, and forward to, the nascent Microsoft-Nokia alliance offering and RIM's offering for content-is-king allies and true competitive choices.

As much as Google tries to fool Little Red Riding Hood content owners that their Grandma always had such big eyes and big teeth, most mobile content providers will spot the Google commons wolf in disguise.