My Forbes Op-ed on Google’s Disregard for the Law

My new Forbes’ op-ed: Google Disregards the Law, tells the sordid story behind today’s story of Google apparently agreeing to settle a criminal investigation with the Department of Justice for ~$500m for promoting and accepting advertising from illegal online pharmacies.

• The op-ed sadly chronicles that this latest law-breaking by Google is part of a well-established pattern of disregard for the rule of law.
• If one cannot trust a public Fortune 100 company to obey the law, one cannot trust them overall as I explain in much great detail in my new book “Search & Destroy Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc.“
• See: www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com for the different ways you can buy the book.

Announcing My New Book: Search & Destroy Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc.

I’ve long thought there was a big untold story about Google, essentially a book all about Google, but told from a user’s perspective, rather than the well-worn path of Google books told largely from Google’s own paternal perspective.

(You can buy the book, Search & Destroy Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc. at www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com, Telescope Books, Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Apps, Barnes & Noble, The Nook, and The Nook Apps.)

Given that Google is the most ubiquitous, powerful and disruptive company in the world, it seemed logical to me that users, and people affected by Google, had a lot of important and fundamental questions about Google that no book had ever tried to answer in a straightforward and well-defended manner.

• Questions like:
• Can I trust Google with my information?
• Does Google respect my privacy?
• Does Google respect others’ property?
• Is security a priority for Google?
• Is Google as ethical as it claims to be?
• Is Google dominating what information people access?
• Does Google have a hidden political agenda?
• Where is the Google juggernaut taking us?
• Do we want to go there? and if not,
• What can be done about it?
• Search & Destroy Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc. answers these questions based on the facts.
• I believe anyone who reads the book won’t be able to look at Google Inc. the same way again.
• I also believe the book stands on its own.
• After four years of research, 726 endnotes, and over 150 quotes from Google executives, the evidence and case is overwhelming that most people’s trust in Google Inc. is seriously misplaced.

You can find out more about the book, what people are saying about it, news and interviews about the book, and all the places you can buy it, at www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com.

• My outstanding co-author and publisher is Ira Brodsky of Telescope Books.

Below is a summary of the book from the book jacket to give you a better sense of what the book is all about.

“This is the other side of the Google story—the unauthorized book that Google does not want you to read. In Search & Destroy, Google expert Scott Cleland, shows that the world’s most powerful company is not who it pretends to be.

Google pretends to be a harmless lamb, but chose a full-size model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex as its mascot. Beware the T-Rex in sheep’s clothing.

Google has acquired far more information, both public and private, and has invented more ways to use it, than anyone in history. Information is power, and in Google’s case, it’s the power to influence and control virtually everything the Internet touches. Google’s power is largely unchecked, unaccountable—and grossly underestimated. Google is the Internet’s lone superpower—the new master of the digital information universe. And Google’s power depends almost entirely on the blind trust it has gained through masterful duplicity. Google routinely says one thing and does another.

Cleland proves the world’s #1 brand untrustworthy. He exposes the unethical company hiding behind a “don’t be evil” slogan. He uncovers Google’s hidden political agenda. And he reveals how Google’s famed mission to organize the world’s information is destructive and wrong. Cleland is the first to critically examine where Google is leading us, explain why we don’t want to go there, and propose straightforward solutions.

Google’s unprecedented centralization of power over the world’s information is corrupting both Google and the Internet—a natural result of unchecked power. Google is evolving from an information servant to master—from working for users, to making users work for the Internet behemoth.

Search & Destroy conclusively demonstrates that Google’s goal is to change the world by influencing and controlling information access. Ultimately, Google’s immense unchecked power is destructive precisely because Google is so shockingly-political, unethical and untrustworthy.”

I look forward to your feedback on my new book: Search & Destroy Why you Can’t Trust Google Inc., and would greatly appreciate you sharing this link with your friends and colleagues. Thank you!

Mobile Content: Google’s Commons vs. Apple’s Market

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.

• Content owners are not naive, they are painfully aware of Google’s decade long consistent scofflaw pattern of disregarding the property rights of others.
• To review, without permission, Google:
  • Has copied 13 million books (Google Book Settlement); hundreds of thousands of videos (Viacom vs. Google); and billions of news articles and headlines via Google News;
  • Has sold the trademarked brands of others to their competitors — for profit (Rosetta Stone vs. Google); and
  • Has infringed on the patents of Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, the French and others, to offer a free operating system that does not compensate key patent owners a cent (Oracle vs. Google).
• Why Nokia rejected Google Android, and why most all major video content programmers have rejected Google TV to date, is that content owners and others don’t trust that Google is aligned with their interests in protecting and monetizing their property or their interests in being able to differentiate from their competitors.

Let’s contrast the Google commons with the Apple market to see the real “choice” between what Google Acting CEO Schmidt calls the “openness” of Google and the “closedness” of Apple.

First, from a mobile content producer’s perspective:

• Google’s “Open” means a peer2peer share-fest, a pirate/Wikileaks-sympathetic commons, and a Google ad-dominated ecosystem, where Apple’s “closedness” means a protected, guarded, and subscription-fee monetizable marketplace.
• Google’s open means wide open transparency and little user privacy, where Apple seeks to protect users privacy.
• Google’s open means users are on their own in the open wild west because Google shifts most all responsibility for safety and security to others, whereas Apple appreciates that users want a sheriff in town to protect their safety and security from malware, scams, and harm — and provides security protection as an integral part of their Apple platform.

Second, Google and Apple both are control-freaks, but Google denies and hides that it is, while Apple wears its obsession with control as a badge of honor.

• Google Android chief, Andy Rubin said about Android: “One of the reasons we’ve achieved such adoption is because we have removed all control.”
• Savy content owners know that Google’s claim is not true.
  • Google has tried to eradicate any control by competitors or competitive complement services to commodify them, but Google still keeps iron grip control over the way users find content (search monopoly) and over the metadata of most all Internet interactions, i.e. their monopoly of market inside information of user demand signals, and advertiser and publisher supply signals.

Third, Google’s Acting CEO Schmidt misrepresents Google’s approach in calling Google’s One pass a “very publisher-friendly approach… we basically don’t make any money on this,” per the FT.

• Given Google’s well known commons approach to free information, and their admission here that they don’t want to make money on One Pass, why should mobile content owners trust that Google wants them to make money long term when it is clear Google sees little value in content itself and sees all the value-creation on the web in brokering who wants what content?

In sum, Google’s modus operandi is to lure content owners into the Google platform in any way they can because Google wants to collect all the business-valuable metadata involved with the content: i.e. user traffic demand and private user-hot-buttons; advertiser/publisher supply of advertising including the exact user demographic they are seeking — so that Google can be the centralized and dominant infomediary on the Internet, where everyone else is dependent on Google to succeed in matching up their content with users on the Internet.

• Little Red Riding Hood mobile content should easily spot the Google commons wolf in Grandma’s clothes here, the huge-toothy smile and drooling are dead giveaways.

 

Regulatory Dissonance: FreePress’ Tim Wu at FTC & Administration: No Burdensome Regulations

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.)

When asked by the Wall Street Journal what he would be working on at the FTC, Mr. Wu ominously bragged: “I would be satisfied with getting together rules for the Internet platform.”

• Professor Wu gets an A+ for hubris, given that bringing his FreePress agenda to regulate the Internet for the first time — is in direct conflict with the law of the land (which is to preserve the competitive free market Internet “unfettered by Federal or State regulation“) and with President Obama’s Executive Order that promised the “least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends.”

In sum, most in D.C. fully understand the old adage that “people are policy.”

• The FTC would have been hard-pressed to find a more anti-business, pro-government-regulation-of-the-Internet person to advise the FTC “on rules for the Internet platform.”
• If Mr. Wu’s hubristic announcement of his intentions and his regulatory past are any indication, he will have the FTC chasing after new imagined problems (that require immediate and interventionist government economic regulation) in no time.

FTC advisor Tim Wu + President Obama’s pledge of no burdensome regulation = regulatory dissonance.

Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?

 

Wikileaks and Responsible Open Internet Boundaries

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.

• Congress officially described the Internet in Section 230 of the 1996 Telecom Act as the “competitive free-market Internet.”
• It is also instructive that the reframe of the “competitive free-market Internet” to an “Open Internet” came about in 2008 with the introduction of a House bill HR 5353 (that never got out of subcommittee,) and also with the launch of the Open Internet Coalition, which is now the lead entity lobbying for telephone utility regulation of competitive broadband companies.
• At core, the proposed Open Internet Order is a bold backdoor attempt by the FCC to redefine what should drive official Internet policy — from Congress’ “competitive free market” policy frame in law, to the FCC’s new and radically different “open Internet” frame in FCC regulation — all outside of the normal constitutional policy making process.

This definitional amorphousness of the central term “open” is problematic because the concepts and terms: competitive, competition, free market, are all well defined, understood and tested in court. On the other hand, the terms “open” or “openness” are completely undefined or tested in a policy making or legal context.

• The practical and legal difficulties of defining the word “open” begin with the stunning fact that the word “open” has no less than 88 definitions per dictionary.com.
  • Yes, that is eighty-eight definitions of “open.”
  • Contrast that with Congress’ term: “competitive” which has only 4 definitions per dictionary.com.
• The practical real world difficulties of specifically defining what “open” means in the context of Internet regulation is profoundly compromised by how bad actors routinely attempt to use the word “open” in order to justify or absolve their bad acts.
  • Wikileaks’ Julian Assange justifies his likely criminal behavior with claims to “Keep Governments Open.”
  • The Open Source software movement birthed by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation is based on the anti-property notion that “being free… means… that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.”
  • Peer-2-peer file sharers who traffic in copyright-infringement, routinely take refuge in the anti-property concept that openness means not having to ask permission for, or pay for, Internet content.
  • Patent violators try to take refuge in the existence of Open Source because somehow it vitiates the property rights of others.
  • The Web 2.0 “publicacy” movement promotes radical transparency, openness, and “data empowerment” over peoples right to privacy — to the point where some recommend the — if you have something you want to keep private just don’t do it — approach.
  • And Level 3-Netflix are pushing the anti-property notion that an Open Internet means that Internet content companies have no responsibility to contribute to the costs that their business imposes on others — an anti-usage-based policy approach that the FCC Chairman recently rejected.

Wikileaks Julian Assange’s definition of open Internet appears to be a universal license to do whatever he wants with others property, secrets, and privacy, ostensibly because he does not have to ask anyone’s permission to do so.

• The very real and incalculable carnage that Assange has caused by his reprehensible irresponsibility shines an important spotlight on the dark side and many serious problems of defining an “Open Internet” with the implicit unaccountability expectation of “no permission required” or “innovation without permission.”
• Unfortunately even the FCC Chairman has fallen prey to using “open Internet” language imprecisely to suggest an unaccountable Internet that I don’t believe reflects the totality of his real views.
• In his remarks announcing the proposed “Open Internet Order” the Chairman said:
  • “It is the Internet’s openness and freedom — the ability to speak innovate and engage in commerce without having to ask anyone’s permission — that has enabled the Internet’s unparalleled success.”
• As we’ve learned from the likely crimes of Wikileaks Julian Assange, a responsible open Internet requires the permission of the Government to use Government property or expose Government secrets.
• As we have learned from the ongoing prosecution of those who infringe on others’ copyrights and property, a responsible open Internet requires the permission of property owners to use their property.
• As we have learned from the constant battle against malware, viruses, spam and scams, a responsible open Internet requires the permission of passwords, authentication and safety checks.
• As we learn how much individuals’ privacy is invaded with routine and pervasive online tracking, profiling and fingerprinting, a responsible open Internet requires permission of users to control their privacy — like the FTC staff proposed Do Not Track list that polls strongly indicate people want to have in order to take control of their privacy online.
• As we learn of Level 3-Netflix’ attempt to extort an unfair and unprecedented economic subsidy under the cover of “openness,” a responsible open Internet requires the permission of Internet “peers” in order to sustain a growing and workable Internet infrastructure with economically viable and workable peering arrangements.

To date two prominent Open Internet Coalition members have responsibly abandoned online support of Wikileaks.

• Under pressure, Amazon has stopped hosting the Wikileaks website.
• Under pressure, eBay’s Paypal has dropped a donation account funding Wikileaks.
• In contrast, the Open Internet Coalition’s three highest profile members, to date have refused to responsibly abandon online support of Wikileaks even after Assange has threatened to release catastrophically destructive un-encrypted “Doomsday” files.
  • Google won’t agree to not allow posting of Wikileaks stolen cables on Blogger.
  • Facebook has said “Wikileaks Facebook page does not violate our content standards.”
  • Twitter when asked if it would “permit the Wikileaks account to remain online,” said they had no comment.
• It appears that the Open Internet Coalition is conflicted and reluctant to support a responsible open Internet where bad actors are held accountable.

In sum, beware of the siren song that an “open Internet” somehow requires no permission.

• It is not true today and it has never been true in the past.
• It is a clever backdoor attempt to politically redefine everything about how the Internet operates and functions for everyone –outside of the normal constitutional policy making process.

Officially defining an “open Internet” in an Assange-endorsing manner where no one needs to ask permission to take things that belong to others — is the antithesis of a responsible open Internet.

• The real policy key to “the Internet’s unparalleled success” has been the fact that since 1996:
  • “It is the policy of the United States… to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet… unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”