Piracy

One gets what one rewards and tolerates.

U.S. Internet law and policy, which exempts and immunizes Internet platforms from most normal social responsibility and government accountability, has created a de facto anti-social contract with the American people; a cheaters charter for Internet platforms; and an increasingly corrosive culture of unaccountability.

Inputs drive outputs. Favoring unaccountability, favors irresponsibility.

This latest Facebook fiasco is just the latest in a long series of Internet-unaccountability wake-up calls for Congress.

The problem here is not tech, technology, the Internet, or a business model. They are mere tools that can be used for good or for bad.

The problem here is Congress predicated 1996 U.S. Internet law and policy on the implicit utopian ideal and naïve presumption that Internet technologies and businesses would only be forces for social good and not harm.

The abrupt resignation of Michelle Lee as head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, completes the Trump Administration’s housecleaning of Google’s government guardians in the Executive Branch, that apparently were dutifully placed to watch over Google’s commercial  interests in all the Federal policy and enforcement offices of most commercial importance to Google from 2012-2016.

Ms. Lee’s resignation is relevant to this blog and to Google’s going forward antitrust risk in the U.S., because Ms. Lee played a leading role in the FTC’s abrupt and chaotic closure of all Google FTC antitrust investigations January 3, 2013, shortly after the 2012 election.

Examining her role is relevant to determining if Google’s alleged antitrust violations were dismissed legitimately on the facts and legal merits, or because of improper Google political interference in a law enforcement matter.

Please don’t miss my op-ed on Google in the Australian: “Google out to steal from Australians.”

As Googleopoly has done around much of the world for many years, Google is now twisting arms in Australia’s government to provide Google with blanket protection from Australians’ copyright infringement lawsuits against Google for aiding and abetting in the piracy of Australians’ copyrighted content.

The piece makes fun of Google’s claims that without protection, Google won’t have the financial incentive to innovate.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans formally asked FCC Chairman Agit Pai to close the docket on the set-top box proceeding because it is no longer under active consideration, and because it “remains an unnecessary regulatory threat to the content creation and distribution industries” and casts a “shadow over investment and innovation.”

This is a wise, pro-competitive, pro-property rights, and good government request from Congress to the new Pai FCC.

The FCC should efficiently utilize this decision opportunity to employ the statutory sunset provision in the law to permanently sunset and remove this unnecessary and serious regulatory threat to competition, copyrighted contractual content and its creation, investment, and innovation.

By far the biggest competition problem facing U.S. antitrust and regulatory authorities is the Goobook Ad Cartel, the unaccountable dominant chokepoint for monetizing most online news, content, products and services.

The evidence is compelling that Google and Facebook have colluded to divide up and corner the online advertising market, and consequently, have deterred competition, devalued property and work, dehumanized privacy, and depressed economic growth and employment.

This unprecedented market power and winner-take-all outcome in such a vital sector of the economy is a direct result of purposeful U.S. non-enforcement of antitrust laws for online platforms, and the lavishment of most every public policy advantage upon them that one could imagine. 

Let’s first examine Google and Facebook’s massive monopolies, then their collusion, and then who is harmed and how.

Google & Facebook’s Massive Monopolies

Please don’t miss my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “How U.S. Internet Commons Policies Lessen Growth Jobs & Security.”

It spotlights how U.S. Internet commons policies – where “free” means a price of zero and “open” means no property -- create winner-take all economic outcomes for the Netstablishment at the expense of everyone else.

What does it tell us that no company ultimately bid to buy Twitter over the last month despite several reported brand-name interested buyers?

Twitter is the eighth-most-visited Internet site in the world; the best site in the world for real-time content; and is one of the few public companies in the marketplace that is growing revenue at a 20% annual rate – and no one even submitted a low-ball bid for Twitter? What is going on here?

Apparently, it tells us that there are only two companies in the world that could grow, leverage and monetize Twitter to make it worth roughly $20b under current circumstances – Alphabet-Google and Facebook -- and they both practically can’t buy Twitter for antitrust reasons.

Let’s analyze why.

First, Google and Facebook each individually would face unwanted serious antitrust risk.

Alphabet-Google

Currently, Alphabet-Google is embroiled in this century’s biggest antitrust case in the EU.

When a PR tactic masquerades as principle or sound policy a mess inevitably ensues.

Google and Public Knowledge, the two leading corporate and interest group entities respectively that are opposed to copyright in America, plotted that they could disguise their real intent to “unlock copyright licensing” and devalue the valuable “information flows” of the $200b a year U.S. pay TV industry, with a clever #UnlockTheBox consumer “gift”/sneak attack… just like Greeks did in the Trojan War using the purported “gift” of a huge wooden “Trojan Horse” as a trick to secretly enable soldiers hidden inside the horse to gain entry to the securely protected city of Troy.  

We now know that this FCC AllVid/Set-Top-Box (STB) rulemaking was not really about unlocking set-top-boxes for consumer benefit, but predominantly about unlocking copyright licenses for the nation’s most valuable video programming – to de facto, open-force more proprietary information to be free on the Open Internet.

How can the FCC imagine it is pro-competitive to help Google expand its search monopoly by illegally forcing the search neutrality principle that Google opposes as never justified, on competitive pay-TV providers, in order to divert pay-TV viewer traffic to piracy-friendly Google-YouTube’s 1.6 billion viewers?  

Multiple sources indicate the FCC is on path to include in its final proposed AllVid set-top box order a de facto FCC office of copyright licensing to try and politically paper over obvious policy and enforcement gaps in FCC authority.

It is further evidence that the “Unlock the Box” proponents pushing AllVid are really bent on “unlocking the copyrights, licenses, and contracts” that collectively protect $200b worth of annual video programming business, not the purported $20b set-top box business.

That’s because AllVid proponents continue to demand their initial outrageous and unlawful claim that the FCC should force the pay TV and video programmer industries to give Big Internet companies their $200b of video programming flows for free -- because the Internet wants information to be free.

The FCC’s big legitimacy problem here is that the FCC is not operating in a legal area where they can argue they are due broad court deference, because in this instance the law is very clear.

The FCC does not have the authority to force property owners to give away their copyrighted property for free or to forfeit their legal licensing or contract rights.