Commentary on today’s Senate Anti-Trust Hearing

I don’t have time to carry on at length about today’s Senate hearing on the Google-Yahoo search ads price-fixing deal, so here are a couple of pieces written before the hearing that put in its proper perspective. For your cocktail, try a bit of Information Week, a straight-up tongue loosener. For your appetizer, enjoy Washington … Continue reading “Commentary on today’s Senate Anti-Trust Hearing”

I don’t have time to carry on at length about today’s Senate hearing on the Google-Yahoo search ads price-fixing deal, so here are a couple of pieces written before the hearing that put in its proper perspective.

For your cocktail, try a bit of Information Week, a straight-up tongue loosener.

For your appetizer, enjoy Washington insider and tech buff Declan McCullagh on the revolving arguments:

The U.S. Senate is holding a hearing Tuesday on the antitrust implications of the Google-Yahoo ad deal, and the two companies, along with Microsoft, are testifying. You should expect sober, selfless discussions conducted with the public’s best interests in mind.

Or not. In reality, Microsoft will offer fanciful claims about the alleged detrimental impact of a Google-Yahoo partnership, just as Google offered fanciful claims a few months ago about the alleged detrimental impact of a Microsoft-Yahoo combination.

And for your main course, read Scott Cleland on the importance of advertising earnestly:

This is now a broad antitrust investigation of whether:

* Google and Yahoo are illegally colluding to reduce competition and/or fix prices;
* Google is more broadly abusing its market power illegally to impede competition from its #2 and #3 search advertising competitors Yahoo and Microsoft; and
* Google is abusing its market power in a myriad of ways, for example, “raising the minimum bids on keywords swiftly and steeply.”

And for desert, enjoy Andrew Orlowski’s incredibly insightful analysis of the importance of search ad competition for the future of the Internet economy:

Google: the mother of antitrust battles? | The Register

So Google has been readying itself for regulatory intervention for several years. It lobbies extensively, and thanks to its reach-out program to politicians and wonks, now owns a fair chunk of mindshare among the political elites. With its private “Zeitgeist” conference – an annual orgy of self-glorification – it reaches over the heads of representatives and and hacks to the political leaders and media owners themselves. In the UK, there’s a revolving door between the two major parties and Google.

Politicians can sprinkle a little of the future on themselves just by rubbing up against the web giant.

As Microsoft discovered, fortuitously, this is money well-spent. A sympathetic Bush administration dissolved the DoJ’s will to impose tough penalties against Microsoft more effectively than any lawyer or economist.

And finally, have some nuts with your brandy in the form of the testimony submitted to the hearing, which is just as Declan said it would be.

After I’ve seen the video of the hearing, I’ll have something else to say.

Google not censoring PFF – or are they?

UPDATE 2: On further analysis, it seems that we were right the first time. Google does in fact flag as containing malware the majority of PFF’s PDF documents on net neutrality, and none of these documents actually does contain malware, viruses, or exploits. It’s a case of “guilt by association” as they share a directory … Continue reading “Google not censoring PFF – or are they?”

UPDATE 2: On further analysis, it seems that we were right the first time. Google does in fact flag as containing malware the majority of PFF’s PDF documents on net neutrality, and none of these documents actually does contain malware, viruses, or exploits. It’s a case of “guilt by association” as they share a directory with some infected files. This doesn’t mean Google is deliberately censoring free-market ideas on net neutrality, but they certainly are interfering with the public’s access to them. This is more a case of incompetence than of deliberate censorship, however.

Let’s apply the same standard to Google that its net neutrality partners have applied to Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. ISPs shape traffic on their first mile networks, sometimes with blunt instruments and sometimes with surgical tools. According to Free Press and Google’s other partners in the net neutrality “let’s micro-manage broadband” coalition, blunt instrument management is a sign of anti-competitive bias.

How does Google look if we judge their actions by the yardstick they propose for ISPs? Guiilty as sin. Now you see why this is an important story.

UPDATE: See the comment by Erica George of Stop Badware. It’s actually Google that identifies malware-infected sites, and Stop Badware simply works the process of removing black-listed sites when their problem is resolved. These stories are hard to get right, but we try.

In a now-deleted post, I complained about certain net neutrality criticisms being apparently censored by Google. This was an error by my part, as I rushed a reader e-mail into a blog post without doing my research. Here’s a comment by PFF on the matter:
Continue reading “Google not censoring PFF – or are they?”

Marketplace Story on FCC and Comcast

I’m on today’s edition of Marketplace, FCC considers Comcast’s net blocking They illustrate the rationale for treating applications differently by playing an audio clip with an interruption. It’s very clever.

I’m on today’s edition of Marketplace, FCC considers Comcast’s net blocking

They illustrate the rationale for treating applications differently by playing an audio clip with an interruption. It’s very clever.

Kevin Martin Passes the Test

Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose “fines” on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word “punish” rather than “fine,” and a headline writer at the New York Times added “penalty” to it: “F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on … Continue reading “Kevin Martin Passes the Test”

Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose “fines” on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word “punish” rather than “fine,” and a headline writer at the New York Times added “penalty” to it: “F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast” (I won’t quote the story because I’m a blogger and the AP is the AP, so click through.) Much of the initial reaction to the story was obviously colored by the headline.

Martin’s concept of punishment is to order the company to do what it had already told the public it was doing, phasing out one system of traffic management in favor of another one. It’s a non-penalty punishment, akin to forcing a misbehaving child to eat the candies she’s already enjoying. Now back to our story.
Continue reading “Kevin Martin Passes the Test”

Google’s political head-fake

Here are a few excerpts from my piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on Google’s net neutrality trickery: The devil’s best trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist, but Google only has to convince us that it’s not evil. Nearing an agreement with Yahoo to grab the ailing company’s search business, Google scripted … Continue reading “Google’s political head-fake”

Here are a few excerpts from my piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on Google’s net neutrality trickery:

The devil’s best trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist, but Google only has to convince us that it’s not evil. Nearing an agreement with Yahoo to grab the ailing company’s search business, Google scripted a series of dramatic public events apparently designed to distract from the pending deal. These events emphasize network neutrality, an ever-changing regulatory ideal that Google thrust into the political spotlight two years ago. As entertaining as this spectacle is, regulators should not be fooled. They should apply traditional anti-monopoly standards, blocking the Google-Yahoo deal.

…

The centerpiece of Google’s net neutrality misdirection campaign, a new initiative to bring faster broadband at lower prices to American consumers, was book-ended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s visit to Washington and a public endorsement of heavy broadband regulation by Internet pioneer and Google Vice President Vint Cerf. The initiative, Internet for Everyone, is virtually identical to earlier network neutrality organizations, It’s Our Net and Save the Internet. Each of these organizations was fronted by rock-star intellectuals such as Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of the Google-funded Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and his protégé, Tim Wu, the new chairman of the advocacy group Free Press.

…

Initially, network neutrality was the demand that network carriers ignore the Internet’s fundamental inequality. Google had good reason to advocate this, because it is advantaged by a status quo in which money buys privilege. Any move by carriers to selectively boost speeds for fees dulls the advantage Google has secured for itself by building huge complexes of hundreds of thousands of computers.

These complexes exploit a flaw in Internet architecture that enables them to seize more than their fair share of network bandwidth, effectively giving their owner a fast lane. A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality.

…

The tech press has been too busy reprising its Internet Bubble era cheerleading and cooing about Google’s network neutrality “idealism” to raise questions about the demise of Yahoo as a search competitor. Fortunately, the Justice Department is investigating, and Congress has planned several hearings, including one today.

Read the whole thing, if you please, and tell me what you think about the argument.

UPDATE: Nice reaction from Om Malik at Gigaom. Also Scott Cleland at Precursor and Hands Off the Internet. Paul Kapustka isn’t very impressed with my reasoning, unfortunately.

Today’s Senate committee testimony is here, and the announcment of next week’s Senate hearing is here and next week’s House hearing is here.

Robbing The Cookie Jar

What do you do if your mom finds out you’ve been robbing the cookie jar? Blame your little brother, of course. And that’s the essence of the net neutrality campaign that the Internet’s major monopoly has been waging against its little brothers the telecom and cable companies. The San Francisco Chronicle is running my Op-Ed … Continue reading “Robbing The Cookie Jar”

What do you do if your mom finds out you’ve been robbing the cookie jar? Blame your little brother, of course. And that’s the essence of the net neutrality campaign that the Internet’s major monopoly has been waging against its little brothers the telecom and cable companies.
The San Francisco Chronicle is running my Op-Ed on the subject tomorrow, details and a link to follow.

Pew Study: Broadband is Healthy

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released their latest report on broadband in America today, and it looks pretty rosy. Pew makes a great deal out of the fact that broadband use isn’t rising among America’s poor, but that’s hardly surprising. You sort of need a computer, some education, and an income of some … Continue reading “Pew Study: Broadband is Healthy”

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released their latest report on broadband in America today, and it looks pretty rosy. Pew makes a great deal out of the fact that broadband use isn’t rising among America’s poor, but that’s hardly surprising. You sort of need a computer, some education, and an income of some sort to make much use of broadband, so until those issues are addressed you’re not going to see much change over the 25% broadband use among Americans with household incomes below $20,000. Not many of these people have health insurance either, and I imagine they’d choose it before broadband if you asked. Broadband isn’t growing among the richest Americans either, having reached 85% among $100,000+ households. What are these people doing that’s so much more fun than reading blogs?

Some highlights I found interesting:

* Broadband is getting cheaper:

Overall, home broadband users reported that their monthly payment for internet service was $34.50 – 4% less than the figure of $36 per month reported in December 2005.2 This decline in monthly broadband bills is half the rate (8%) reported over the February 2004 to December 2005 timeframe.

* DSL and cable are losing share to Fiber and Wireless:
facilities

* Prices aren’t falling faster because users choose premium services:

One possible reason that users’ monthly broadband bills did not fall as fast from 2005 to 2008 as was the case in the 2004-05 interval is the existence of pricier premium service. Most (54%) of broadband users say they subscribe to basic broadband service, but nearly one-third (29%) say they subscribe to a premium service at a higher price.

* Price isn’t the reason more people don’t have broadband, it’s lack of interest:

Still, one-third (33%) of non-internet users say they are simply not interested in the internet, with another 12% saying they don’t have access. Some 9% of non-users say the internet is too difficult or frustrating for them and just 7% say it is too expensive.

The overall state of broadband in America isn’t nearly as dire as Google’s Internet For Everyone coalition maintains, but they’re going to spin this report to say that it is.

DOJ Not Asleep at the Wheel

Justice Department to review Google-Yahoo deal: The U.S. Justice Department plans to gather information from third parties in a probe of the advertising deal struck last month between Google and Yahoo, according to sources familiar with these types of investigations. Within the next week, the Justice Department is expected to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) … Continue reading “DOJ Not Asleep at the Wheel”

Justice Department to review Google-Yahoo deal:

The U.S. Justice Department plans to gather information from third parties in a probe of the advertising deal struck last month between Google and Yahoo, according to sources familiar with these types of investigations.

Within the next week, the Justice Department is expected to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) that seek documents from the third parties, said one source, noting the information requested could range from a general request on the competitive landscape to very specific requests involving Yahoo and Google.

Third parties that are expected to receive the CIDs include competitors, customers like major advertisers, and potential partners, the source added.

Not a moment too soon.

Netgear dumps trash with Open Source

Dana Blankenhorn is excited about Netgear’s announcement that it’s fully supporting a router intended to run open source software, but he’s off on the relevance of the hardware: MyOpenRouter offers developers a comprehensive user guide, applications forums and downloads. Best of all this isn’t a stinky would-not-sell-otherwise router. It’s got an internal diversity antenna to … Continue reading “Netgear dumps trash with Open Source”

Dana Blankenhorn is excited about Netgear’s announcement that it’s fully supporting a router intended to run open source software, but he’s off on the relevance of the hardware:

MyOpenRouter offers developers a comprehensive user guide, applications forums and downloads. Best of all this isn’t a stinky would-not-sell-otherwise router. It’s got an internal diversity antenna to improve performance, and supports WPS.

Actually, that’s not at all impressive.Every Wi-Fi router built in the last three years supports diversity and WPS, but the relevant ones also support 802.11n. This is simply an obsolete b/g router that Netgear is dumping, probably to reduce inventory. Wake me up when you see an open source router supporting 802.11n, I’ll buy one in a heartbeat.

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