Copyright

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.

Google's oft-stated goal to "change the world" and its famed mission to centralize all of the world's information to make it universally accessible, self-appoints Google to be the world's omni-information gatekeeper, distributor, librarian, publisher, editor, programmer, and broadcaster.

In building its Googleopoly, Google represented itself to everyone as unbiased and neutral in order to gain everyone's trust.

A core concern with Google's centralized information power and opaque black box system is that Google has the unaccountable power and constant opportunity to decide what information people around the world access, and also to decide what information Google does not want them to find.

Today in Politico's top story "Tech War: Google vs Microsoft" by Elizabeth Wasserman, I was quoted saying: "It's scary that the monopoly information access point of the world is going after voices of dissent."

• What do I mean about going after dissenters?
  • Read Brian Deagon's Investors Business Daily 12-10 piece "When Analysts Look Over Their Shoulders," which chronicles how the Google Dissent Police bullies the press to not talk with, or quote, Google critics they don't like.

If ever there was a prime example of "regulatory dissonance" it would be:

• An Administration engaging in a high-profile campaign to promote regulatory restraint to avoid and fix "burdensome regulations" (in an Executive Order, in the State of the Union, and in a Presidential Speech at the Chamber of Commerce in the span of two weeks), and
• The recent hiring of FreePress Chairman Tim Wu as a senior policy advisor at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
  • (FreePress is well-known as the single most radical anti-capitalist, anti-property, hyper-regulatory activist group in D.C., and
  • Tim Wu is well known for proposing sweeping preemptive regulation of competitive industries with no proof of a regulatory problem -- in pushing for preemptive net neutrality regulations that culminated in the FCC's Open Internet Order, and for preemptive "Carterfone" wireless regulations of the FCC's 700 MHz auctions.)

Has Google shifted its legal strategy from its scorched earth legal tactics to more brand-friendly 'Settlements 'R' Us' political tactics?

• And is Google politically ramping up its lobbying against "search regulation" to try and minimize the restrictions it has to abide by in order to settle the phalanx of serious law enforcement investigations and lawsuits it is facing on antitrust, privacy and intellectual property?

I. There is emerging evidence that Google may be in settlement court-regulation-submission mode.

The company that has copied all the world's information on its servers without permission and has a mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," ironically has decided to be publicly indignant about the alleged copying of its public search information.

• It is the supreme irony that "glass-house Google" has accused Microsoft of copying Google's public search results.
  • In a blog post Google shared its purpose behind its stone-throwing accusation: "...to those who have asked what we want out of this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop."

It pathetically ironic that Google can comprehend that it does not like to have its own claimed private or proprietary information copied and made accessible to the world for free, but Google cannot comprehend why anyone else would not like Google to copy their private or proprietary information without permission and make it available to the world for free.

Let's review all of the other entities who like Google would "like for this practice to stop" -- by Google.

Could Google now possibly better understand why:

Julian Assange's reprehensible Wikileaks data breaches of secret, private and proprietary information to the web, endangering lives, diplomacy and peace, has thrust to the forefront of public debate: what are the responsible boundaries of an "Open Internet?"

• It is an especially timely debate given that the FCC is proposing an "Open Internet Order" for FCC decision on December 21st, and given that the FCC is trying to officially define what an "open Internet" is for the first time, in order to restrict what competitive broadband Internet providers can and cannot do.

It is instructive that the term "open Internet" is found nowhere in law.

Why are the Big Four networks Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS, not flocking to Google TV, the largest digital video distribution network in the the world -- by far? And why did Forrester's analyst characterize Google TV's programmer sign-ups to date as "underwhelming?"

The core reason is a profound vision and business model clash between existing programmers/distributors and Google Inc. Why?

In a comical defense of Google, David Balto of the Center for American Progress pleaded for the Government to not regulate Google in his HuffPo Op-ed: "Regulating Google: Searching for a solution without a problem." Let me count the ironies here.

First, Mr. Balto is attempting to shield Google behind the successful defense of the broadband industry against mandated net neutrality regulation that "net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem."

That defense works because it is true. The industry has only one official net neutrality violation that has withstood scrutiny and due process -- Madison River in 2005. Since then, the roughly 2,000 broadband networks in the U.S. have abided by the FCC's 2005 Broadband Principles and remain committed to work constructively to ensure that consumers can neutrally access and use the legal content, applications, and devices of their choice.

The link is here to: "Googleopoly VI -- How Google is Monopolizing Consumer Internet Media and Threatening a Price Deflationary Spiral and Major Job Losses in a Trillion Dollar Sector" -- It is a 41 page PowerPoint presentation with 18 pages of pictorial analysis.

Below is the Executive Summary: (The PDF link is here.)

Executive Summary

Googleopoly VI – Seeing the Big Picture: How Google is Monopolizing Consumer Internet Media

And Threatening a Price Deflationary Spiral & Major Job Losses in a $Trillion Sector

By Scott Cleland* President of Precursor LLC, September 13, 2010

Serial beehive kicker Google, just kicked the wrong beehive -- IAC.

• Kudos to FT's Richard Waters for his outstanding front-page story based on an interview with Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC and Chairman of Expedia, on the implications of the Google-ITA deal and Google's lack of search neutrality.
  • Read the article and visualize the angry bee swarm, whose hive has been kicked and which is pursuing the kicker with a vengence.  

So fixated on stomping on the potential competitive threat posed by Microsoft's vertical search competitive differentiation strategy, i.e. by buying the dominant airline software supplier ITA, Google apparently did not look down to see that it was trampling on the honey pot of one Google's biggest and most important partners/allies -- IAC and Barry Diller -- in buying ITA and abruptly heralding its broader ambitions of invading and conquering the vertical space of its many online content partners.

• Google made a very big strategic mistake on this deal that will be hard for Google's legendary PR machine to cover up.  

Why will the IAC sting hurt Google more than other beehives that Google has kicked?