Google

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.

Has a new day dawned for U.S. antitrust scrutiny of Alphabet-Google? 

The evidence is overwhelming that Alphabet-Google has broadly extended its search and search monopolies into several more markets, and that it has done so anti-competitively in the four years since the FTC chaotically shut down its search, search advertising, and Android investigations in January 2013.

The question here is will Google’s many monopolies enjoy no FTC antitrust enforcement over the next four years of the Trump Administration, like Google apparently enjoyed in the last four years of the Obama Administration?   

To set a baseline of what has happened since the FTC apparently stopped enforcing antitrust law against Google, its instructive to remember where Google stood at that time with the FTC, via brief conclusions from the FTC staff investigators and then from the FTC commissioners.

In October 2012, the FTC Staff Report said:    

Let me start by defending Alphabet-Google’s right and decision to sue Uber for what it says was the “unlawful misappropriation of our trade secrets, patent infringement, and unfair competition,” by way of the alleged unauthorized downloading “over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files” from Alphabet-Google-Waymo’s work on its proprietary self-driving car LiDAR hardware sensors.

I support every property owner’s right to protect their property from theft.

That said, when Alphabet-Google, arguably America’s worst corporate IP thief (see below), sues Uber for IP theft, it reminds us of the adage that there is “no honor among thieves.”

This appears to be a teachable moment for Uber’s legal defense team.

New Trump FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s keynote speech on “Building the 5G Economy” at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today spotlighted to the communications world that the U.S. FCC is going in a very different policy direction than that of the previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who just happens to be speaking at the same event as a private citizen to a break-out session on “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The fact that they are both at the largest communications event in the world delivering starkly divergent messages and visions, on the same day, provides an instructive and illuminating opportunity to juxtapose their contrasting policy approaches.

Summary: The de facto Goobook ad cartel is quickly crushing its only current online social advertising platform competitor, Twitter. Twitter’s failing business is the proverbial canary in the coal mine that should bring attention to the imminent danger of this apparent cartel to the future commercial viability of the broader online content marketplace.

Practically it means U.S. antitrust authorities’ lax antitrust enforcement has facilitated the emergence of twin colluding monopolies in search and social advertising. The result is a de facto and unaccountable new media cartel, the 21^st century Google/Facebook Fourth Estate, that is anti-competitively destroying and supplanting the original, old media, Fourth Estate, and that is the central facilitator of algorithmic-automated “fake news.”      

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Please don’t miss my latest The Hill op-ed, “Congress Please Undo FCC’s Dysfunctional Internet Privacy Rules,” which explains how these last minute regulations created a confusing mess for consumers.

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.

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill Op-ed “The New Political Calculus for Net Neutrality.”

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill op-ed entitled “Rating the FCC’s Net Neutrality Enforcement Policy a Zero”

• It explains how net neutrality ceased being pro-consumer.  

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