Fraud

Google often acts as if it thinks it is above the law. That may be the most plausible explanation for why Google is under antitrust investigation on five continents, has had 35+ privacy scandals, and has been sued for eight different kinds of infringement/theft from most every content industry.

I. Cover-ups

FreePress' latest net neutrality folly and political agitation is pushing the SEC to make shareholders from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint vote on inappropriate, ill-advised, and unwarranted proposed shareholder resolutions in favor of wireless net neutrality in the weeks ahead.

Let me count the ways this is a waste of time and abuse of process.

First, it inappropriately and destructively attempts to politicize non-political entities, by trying to force a public political position from non-political corporate entities, whose contractual and fiduciary responsibility to shareholders is to economically/financially grow the value and profitability of the corporation.

Second, the appropriate place to have political votes is in legitimate political processes, elections or representative votes or decisions by elected officials at the appropriate local, state, and Federal level, which enjoy the constitutional, political, and relevant authority and legitimacy to decide political issues in a meaningful, substantive and productive way.

Third, the operative authority here for shareholders, the companies' shareholder agreements, corporate charter, and bylaws, are legally grounded on a contractual agreement between the company and shareholder to protect and grow the shareholders investment in the company, not to promote extra-political positions that actually could endanger the underlying purpose of the shareholders agreements.

Memo: To All Google Spokespeople

From: Brandi Sparkles & the Privacy Excuse Algorithm Team (PEAT)

RE: The New Google Public Line on FTC/State/EU Privacy Investigations

Google has changed the company's public line concerning our inadvertent, unintentional, un-anticipatable, accidental, unexpected, unwitting, un-premeditated, unconscious, and totally innocent bypassing of Apple Safari browser's privacy protections, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal February 19^th, and which is now being investigated by the FTC, State Attorneys General, and the EU per the WSJ today.

Why are market forces so weak in protecting users’ online privacy?

The main reason is that the online marketplace is economically structured around users being a commodity, data, to be aggregated and mined, not customers to be served and protected in a competitive marketplace. That’s because the overriding economic force that created the free and open commercial Internet – the predominant Silicon Valley venture capital/IPO value creation model – was and remains largely antithetical to protecting online privacy.

The Silicon Valley venture capital/IPO driven model is laser-focused on achieving Internet audience/user scale fastest in order to gain first-mover advantage and then rapid dominance of a new product or service segment. This predominant Internet economic model is predicated on a precious few investments achieving such rapid user scale that it: warrants a buy-out at an enormous premium multiple; enables fast and exceptionally-profitable liquidity (via the new secondary derivative market for private venture shares or employee options); or broad liquidity via a public IPO.

What is the essential critical element of achieving audience/user scale fastest? Free. No direct cost to the user fuels fastest, frictionless, viral adoption. This free economic model presupposes online advertising as an eventual monetization mechanism and shuns products and services directly paid for by the user because their inherent time-to-market is too slow and their upfront sunk cost of sales and customer service is too high for this predominant value creation model.

The bipartisan Senate letter to the FTC calling for a "thorough investigation" of Google's alleged antitrust violations has broader implications than many appreciate.

Please see my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here.

The House Manager’s Amendment to the pending House Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) fixed the major legitimate problems with the original bill, effectively isolating the small but extremely vociferous minority of SOPA opponents, especially Google.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here for a political outlook of the SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy legislation, which is likely to become law in 2012.

Many thanks to Adam Thierer of the Technology Liberation Front, for selecting my book, Search & Destroy, as a top twenty most Important Cyber-Law & Info-Tech Policy books of 2011 because “it represented the beginning of an articulation of a philosophy of “cyber-conservatism.”  I also thank Adam for his critical and insightful review of Search & Destroy, which clearly delineates his principled cyber-libertarian differences with my principled “cyber-conservative” views.

The kerfuffle painting the Google Wallet App as an innocent victim of Verizon blocking -- in violation of an "open" Internet and net neutrality regulations -- completely misses the forest for the trees. This conflict revolves around two ongoing industry battles.

To see what this kerfuffle is really all about read my Forbes Tech Capitalist blog post here: Android's Pickpocket behind Google Wallet.

The likely passage of online anti-piracy legislation (SOPA/PIPA) in 2012 has put a spotlight on the substantial ad-based business interests aligned with piracy and against piracy enforcement.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here to learn why Grand Theft Auto-mated is such big business and so anti-piracy enforcement.

Grand Theft Auto-mated! Online Ad-Economics Fuel Piracy & SOPA Opposition