Codism

Google is unique in its leadership, plans, and global marketpower to accelerate the majority of all global Web traffic “going dark,” i.e. encrypted by default. Google’s “going dark” leadership seriously threatens  to neuter sovereign nations’ law-enforcement and intelligence capabilities to investigate and prevent terrorism and crime going forward.

Google is not the only U.S. Internet company endangering the national security of many countries by “going dark” via end-to-end corporate encryption in an environment of exceptional terrorist risk -- Apple has been self-servingly irresponsible as well.

Nevertheless, Google warrants the spotlight and primary focus here on “going dark” for three big reasons.

GoogleNet is Google’s vision to leverage its proliferating dominance by offering global, near-free Internet-access, mobile connectivity, and Internet-of-Things connectivity via a global, largely-wireless, Android-based, “GoogleNet,” that is subsidized by Google’s search and search advertising dominance and by “open Internet” zero pricing of downstream Internet traffic.

A near-free global GoogleNet would be much like the Google Playbook which offers Android, Maps, YouTube, and others’ content for free globally, to disrupt and commoditize competitors in order to maintain and extend its search and search advertising dominance throughout the economy.

Please don’t miss my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “Accelerating the De-Americanization of the Internet.”

It explains the broad implications for the Internet of:

• America handing over the master key of the Internet to ICANN; and
• the European Parliament updating privacy law for the first time since 1995 nearly unanimously. 

This is Part 5 of my “World Changing the Internet” research series.

World Changing the Internet.

Part 1: Seven Ways the World is Changing the Internet [1-11-12]

A more apt name for Jerry Brito’s new website, PiracyData.org, would be BlameTheVictims.org.

In a tweet trumpeting the purpose of PiracyData.org, Mr. Brito exclaimed: “Here’s why Hollywood should blame itself for its piracy problems – [link] Thx to @binarybits[Wash-post blogger] for this write up!”

In a Washington Post piece, neither labeled as opinion or news analysis, author Timothy B. Lee, charged that “These charts show Comcast acting more and more like a monopolist,” but badly failed in backing up that highly pejorative “monopolist” assertion. 

Mr. Lee reprinted charts provided by Comcast to rebut a previous unsupported assertion by Mr. Lee that American “broadband speeds were stagnating.”

Mr. Lee’s attempted gotcha in his latest piece failed as a result of a demonstrably poor understanding of economics, competition, business and capitalism.

Bubbles happen because people ignore economics and assume away reality in their excitement over a new idea. “Virtual currencies” could be the latest tech “economics of abundance” bubble in the making. Fans of abundance economics imagine that the free and open Internet’s near zero marginal cost of borderless transactions will ultimately slay traditional economics of scarcity.

Cyber-utopians imagine that currency, or money, is a simple function, like any other product or service that they have made openly available to everyone in the world at virtually no cost on the Internet. They imagine the only thing that matters with the business of money is how money is transmitted.

They assume creating money is just a coding and crowd-sourcing task. How hard could that be? What possibly could go wrong? It’s only money.

Ever wonder why there are so many never ending tech policy and political battles?

Why there are so many recurring:

• Content battles over copyright and anti-piracy enforcement?
• Software battles over open source versus proprietary software and the legitimacy of software patents?

• Broadband battles over net neutrality, data caps, and spectrum allocations?

• General battles over online privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and hacking?

Ever wonder why so many of the same people and entities are involved in the same tech policy and political battles over and over again?

The answer is it is an ideological struggle, but not the 20^th century kind with which most people are familiar, for example like progressive vs. conservative, or republican vs. democrat. This is a new and different kind of ideological struggle between realspace and cyberspace that is unique to the 21^st century and to the Internet Age.