Google and the Internet Bed it Made — Contortions of Justifying a Google Exemption From Principles
July 15, 2010
Google strongly legitimized the problem of “search neutrality” in arguing in detail in an FT op-ed today why Google’s search should not be neutral.
- The essence of Google’s search neutrality problem is that they are imploring everyone to do what they say, but not what they do.
- (And Google does have a very big problem when the New York Times writes an editorial: “The Google Algorithm“ questioning if Google’s search “leads us fairly to where we want to go.”
- Google’s search neutrality problem is also entirely of their own making.
- Google has constructed Google’s brand as the “Don’t be evil” world champion for neutrality, openness, transparency, and no censorship, on the Internet, when their public deeds to not square with the public representation of their brand values and their full-throated claims of being neutral, open, transparent, fair, or not being the “Ultimate Internet Gatekeeper.”
As one of the first to regularly document Google’s systematic hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another, and demanding its competitors operate in ways Google is unwilling operate, it is important to address the sincerity of Google’s arguments against being subject to “search neutrality” by governments, as explained by Ms. Mayer, Google’s VP of Product and User Experience, in her FT op-ed: “Do not neutralise the web’s endless search.”
- Innovation: Google argues search neutrality mandates could stifle its innovation.
- However, Google has summarily dismissed that same innovation problem argument made by its competitors as the lead bankroller and lobbying force for the last four years behind the push for preemptive “net neutrality” mandates and Title II Telephone monopoly price and non-discrimination regulation for all broadband providers.
- Abuse: Google argues that antitrust oversight of search would lead to gaming of the algorithm and harming the consumer experience.
- Google’s argument is a straw man, as there are a number of internal controls, and third-party/Government oversight processes and procedures that could address anti-competitive or deceptive business practices without the full disclosure of Google’s trade secrets.
- Everyone knows there are business confidentiality rules the government follows that can easily address this Google concern.
- Commoditization: How can Google argue that an expectation that Google not use its monopoly power to discriminate against non-Google-owned content would result in commoditization, when Google argues that mandated monopoly non-discrimination regulation of its competitive broadband competitors would not result in commoditization?
- Consumer Choice: Google argues that antitrust oversight of the neutrality and fairness of its search results would undermine consumer choice and search competition.
- The problem is that, despite arguing that Google works for users, Google gets paid by advertisers and publishers — not users.
- Google has a standard “Competition is One Click Away” defense that is bogus because the anti-competitive problem results from the Internet Choice Paradox, where consumer have great choice of digital information providers, but digital information providers face a Google bottleneck in reaching the global Internet audience.
In sum, Google’s self-proclaimed “search neutrality” problem is entirely of its own making.
- It has been caught in its own “don’t be evil” net, and its own longstanding, well-documented, and principled public stances arguing for world neutrality, openness, transparency, and no censorship on the Internet.
Google’s bigger problem is that it has little credibility in arguing that all the rules that Google has sought to burden its competitors with should not apply fairly to Google, when Google is caught doing what Google has long argued is wrong.
- No PR contortions from Google’s legendary PR machine, can get people to support principles, laws, and regulations that apply to everyone… but Google.
Skype’s Net Neutrality Infidelity Scandal
July 14, 2010
Skype, one of the high priests of the net neutrality movement, that preaches for Title II monopoly regulation of all the broadband providers it already rides upon for free, has been caught in the act of being blatantly unfaithful to its widely-professed net neutrality principles, by blocking interconnectivity to Fring!
Arstechnica and The Hill have both flagged Skype’s hypocrisy and infidelity to its supposed net neutrality and openness principles in blocking mobile video calling competitor Fring from access to Skype’s dominant network of a ~half-billion interconnected users.Now we know that Skype’s proclaimed principled stance for net neutrality and openness was really just a cynical PR and lobbying campaign of crony capitalism, and political cover for an industrial policy where the FCC picks Skype, Google Android, and Amazon Kindle as the “dumb pipe” market winners, and all broadband providers as the “dumb pipe” market losers.
Skype’s “do as I say not as I do” stance is particularly hypocritical because of Skype’s dominant size relative to Fring, in that Skype has about a half billion users and is “responsible for 12% of global international calling minutes” per Skype.
To the exent that the FCC attempts to change existing net neutrality rules, at a minimum, they should continue to be technologically-neutral, given the FCC’s well-known abysmal track record in trying to choose technologies and pick market winners and losers over the last several decades.
It will be interesting to see if the FCC remains silent as one of the biggest complainers of non-neutral blocking — blocks a competitor non-neutrally — or if the FCC will investigate the Skype-Fring blocking affair.
And where is SaveTheInternet and FreePress when a dominant-size half-billion-user network like Skype does to the little guy what they supposedly claim to oppose on principle…
The Perils of Google’s New War on Apple
June 16, 2010
Google has much to lose in its ill-advised PR and public policy war with Apple, its previous closest Silicon Valley ally.
Antitrust or Fiduciary liablility? Google’s recent market behavior puts Google and its CEO Eric Schmidt in a lose-lose situation.
- Remember this time last year the FTC began investigating Google and Apple for potentially collusive over-lapping board seats, despite Mr. Schmidt’s assertion at the time that Apple was not a “primary competitor” to Google.
- Mr. Schmidt resigned from the Apple board under FTC pressure in August 2009.
- Google and its CEO are now in a real pickle:
- Either Google’s very recent competitive entry into competition with Apple’s: iPhone (Droid), iPad (Google Tablet), AdMob, Apple TV (Google TV), and ITunes (Google Music) — is prima facie evidence that Mr. Schmidt was colluding with Apple to not compete before… OR Google CEO Eric Schmidt is under intense personal risk of having violated his personal fiduciary duty as an Apple Director to protect and advance the interests of Apple and its shareholders.
- It’s hard to believe that Google has been able to launch all these new direct competitive alternatives to Apple: Droid, Google Tablet, AdMob, Google TV, and Google Music, in just the last year, with no involvement of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who should have recused himself because of his intimate knowledge of Apple’s business, strategy, innovation secrets, and product launch timetable.
- This makes the Apple patent infringement suit against HTC a very serious threat to Google CEO Eric Schmidt personally, given his longtime fiduciary duty to protect Apple and its shareholders from when he was a Apple Director.
- While the official legal target of the suit was Google supplier HTC, I believe the real goal is to gain legal discovery/depositions of Mr. Schmidt and all his product managers of
Droid, and possibly Google Tablet, AdMob, Google TV, and Google Music. - If legal discovery of Google’s emails and other records find that Mr. Schmidt passed on any knowledge of Apple’s plans or trade secrets, Google, and Mr. Schmidt personally, are at serious legal risk.
- Moreover, this is not hypothetical risk, given what has been learned of Google’s “Freewheeling culture” from Viacom’s depositions against Google-YouTube.
- If Google handled its launches of its phone, tablet, mobile, TV, and music businesses anything like they handled their entry into video via YouTube, this serious personal fiduciary liability Mr. Schmidt faces could turn out to be the most serious risk yet to Google’s long term leadership stability.
- While the official legal target of the suit was Google supplier HTC, I believe the real goal is to gain legal discovery/depositions of Mr. Schmidt and all his product managers of
Brand Liability: Apple’s longstanding innovation leadership as a closed proprietary system, undermines Google mantra and claim that openness is the key to innovation. Google’s attacks on Google for being closed, will only invite more attention to Google’s self-serving openness double standard, where it pushes openness where it facilitates Google entering new businesses with a competition-killing, cross-subsidized free offering, but where Google fiercely resists any openness regarding its opaque black box monopoly markets of search and search advertising — the place openness is most needed.
- Google’s attempts to brand Apple as anti-innovation defies common sense and widespread personal experience, and it only invites comparison to where Google is not at all open, despite its boasts to the contrary.
Privacy Liability: Google’s pervasive invasion of privacy is a huge franchise liability for Google. Google collects more private information about more people without permission than any entity in the world. (See Chart: “Google’s Total Information Awareness Power”)
- Per USAToday:
- “The debate was on vivid display again during the D8 tech conference this month, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs weighed in on the topic. “Privacy means people know what they are signing up for in plain English,” he said. “Some people want to share more data. Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data.“
- As Google tries to misdirect the FTC antitrust investigations toward Apple and away from Google, Apple has the same ability to boomerang FTC concerns about privacy back at Google.
In sum, Google remains its own worst enemy. It serially tattles to regulators and antitrust authorities about the slightest thing others do to Google, all while Google routinely operates well beyond the accepted boundaries of antitrust, copyright, privacy, and security.
Those in glass houses should not be pathological stone-throwers.
Google’s Titanic Security Flaws — “Security is Google’s Achilles Heel” Part VIII of Series
April 22, 2010
Well informed reports (that Google will not deny), that hackers breached Google’s most sensitive software code, the Gaia password system, surface titanic security flaws at Google.
Why Google is too big not to fail.
1. “Bigtable” Storage design: How Google stores and accesses “all the world’s information” in and from its data centers is: “‘Bigtable:’ a Distributed Storage System for Structured Data.” It is Google’s innovation to maximize scalability, speed and cost efficiency — not security, privacy, or accountability. Simply, Bigtable is an “all eggs in one basket” approach to information storage and access.
- It is the single largest database of information the world has ever known. It is also distributed across the world in Google’s multiple data centers. Per Yale computer science Professor Michael Fischer: “Google stores every piece of data in three centers randomly chosen from the many it operates worldwide in order to guard the company’s ability to recover lost information.”
- Per Google’s own Peter Fleischer on his blog: “It’s actually very hard to answer the apparently simple question: ‘where’s my data?‘”
- If Google doesn’t know where your data is at any given time, how do they know if your own private data has been breached?
- The “Titanic” security flaw in Bigtable’s fundamental design is that it is not compartmented.
- Like the Titanic ship that sunk fast because it did not have compartments to partially contain the breach of rapidly incoming water, Google’s Bigtable design, where Google stores all the world’s information in basically one virtual receptacle without compartments, means that when Google’s system was breached, the hackers could theoretically have gone most anywhere in Bigtable.
- Since Google does not employ the standard omni security protocol of compartmentalization, Google would not know what information was breached so that those affected could try and protect themselves from the new liability and danger.
- This helps explain why Google is “turtle-ing” and not giving guidance about what’s secure and what’s not.
- Most likely, they don’t have a clue because Bigtable is simply too big and complex to check.
2. Biggest Target: Google’s unique mission to “organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has effectively created a world central bank of information. As bank robber Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, he infamously replied: “Its where the money is.”
- The reason Google will always be a number one target for hackers is that in designing a system and database for Google to quickly and efficiently access all the world’s information, Google has created the ultimate convenience for hackers to quickly and efficiently access the information they prize because Google put all the valuable information in one virtual place so hackers have a one stop-shop and only one outer wall to overcome.
3. Biggest Speed Freak: Google’s #3 corporate priority is “fast is better than slow;” thus speed is one of Google’s key competitive differentiators. Google’s #2 design principle is “every millisecond counts“… “Nothing is more important than people’s time.” Unfortunately, if Google actually bothered to ask users what their top priority was, most would say safety and security. Without a foundation of trust, what good is speed?
- As I have written extensively, Google is proactively forcing everyone on the Internet to be faster. Google now ties search ranking to the load speed of websites, Google is trying to change the DNS system, and Google has a whole initiative “to make the web faster.”
- Is speed compatible with security, safety and privacy protection? Almost every aspect of security involves some inefficiency, or slowing down to create security checkpoints, verifications, authorizations, patrols, gates, locks, sweeps, spotchecks, etc.
- Do we consider the fastest of just about anything to be safe or the safest?
- Google believes nothing is more important than people’s time. By definition, security is thus a subordinate or tertiary concern to Google’s business, leadership and engineers.
4. Biggest “Open” Proponent: Google is the single biggest force pushing for openness on the Internet. Google has a corporate philosophy that information and content should be shared. Google’s mission is to make all the world’s information accessible — showing that Google feels deeply about breaking down any barriers to bringing information to people (even if it means bending/breaking the law… see: Viacom vs Google, Book Settlement).
- Does anyone consider openness the same as security? Open sharing, an open door, open window, an open interface, are these what most people view as what is most safe and secure? Does openness offer the most protections from bad actors?
- Moreover, Google is attacked because Open Source is more vulnerable to attack than proprietary software, per blogs by a leading open source proponent, here and here.
- Furthermore, Google’s own Director of entreprise application security, Eran Feigenbaum, told CIOs and CISOs: “A lot of data and access is exposed in an open API; it’s not the traditional UI that a user might expect.” “It is incumbent upon you as security officials to know what the security controls of your cloud provider are.”
5. Biggest “Free” Proponent: Like Google’s philosophy and activism for openness, Google is also widely-recognized as the leading proponent of “free content.” At Chris Anderson’s Google book signing of his book “Free: the Future of a Radical Price,” Mr. Anderson said: Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian “taught me everything I know about free.”
- It is both human nature and business practice to treat what is “free” as if it has less value and like it is not in need of extensive protection or security measures.
- Since Google generally takes whatever information it can find and copy, and since it’s mission is to make that information universally accessible to everyone for free… in Google’s mind it should not be focused on making that information secure from those who seek it.
- The titanic big problem here is that while Google may view the information as free to users, users and others certainly don’t view the private information that cohabits Bigtable with “free” information, as not valuable or worthy of high security.
6. Big Monoculture Mindset: Google has a “monoculture” and a “one size fits all” approach to customer service per Yale computer science professor Michael Fischer. Google is well known for its vigorous hiring practices that demand top grades and scores from the top universities, mastery of Mensa brain teasers, and surviving a guantlet of interviews to weed out anyone that won’t fit in with the clone culture of the Google founders.
- The result is a very insular culture that tends to all share the same blinders. The most recent example of this monoculture-with-blinders is how Google claimed to have thoroughly vetted its Google Buzz service internally and no one within Google anticipated the privacy uproar that automatically exposing people’s previously private email lists to the public would be a problem.
- (Ten nations just sent an open letter to Google wondering how Google’s process could have so badly missed these obvious privacy concerns.)
- To better understand the depth of this Google monoculture and “group think” on security matters, consider how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described his Google culture goal in an Economic Club speech in Washington. The company’s goal is “to think big and inspire a culture of yes” and that “Google is melding a positive office culture with minimal accountability controls.” per Washington Internet Daily 6-10-08).
- A corporate culture that respected and valued security, would have a culture that encouraged someone to be able to say “no” and demanded substantial accountability controls.
In sum, for all the big reasons documented above, Google is a security-challenged company and “security is Google’s Achilles heel.”
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Google’s titanic security flaws will only become more problematic now that hackers have figured out how vulnerable Google is, and more importantly, how accessible all this extremely valuable information is.
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Simply, Google is too big not to fail.
***
- Part I: “Why security is Google’s Achilles heel”
- Part II: “Google values security much less than others do”
- Part III: “Google: “Security is part of our DNA” (Do Not Ask)
- Part IV: “Why Security is Google’s Achilles Heel”
- Part V: “Google Apps Security Chief is a magician/mentalist”
- Part VI: “Google-China: Implications for Cybersecurity”
- Part VII: “Did Google Over-React to China Cybersecurity Breach?”
For even more information, see the Security section of PrecursorBlog’s sister site: www.GoogleMonitor.com.
Open source advocate: Google will dominate the cloud
January 20, 2010
While I generally disagree with ZDNet’s open source columnist, Dana Blankenhorn’s views, I regularly follow what he writes and respect his analysis and clarity of thought.
Given all the talk of Google’s many antitrust issues and Google’s own denials that it is a monopoly, Mr. Blankenhorn’s candor as a Google ally, was refreshing in his piece: “Open source and the Google Cloud:”
- “Google has achieved such economies of scale in delivering transactions and storage that competing with them over the long run looks foolish.”
- “Unless you have a breakthrough that can balance out those cost disadvantages you’re really at their mercy. If Google decides to “embrace and extend” its cloud dominance into software and services you’re going to lose.”
- “It’s Google’s world, in other words. Open source just lives in it.”
- If Google decides to “embrace and extend” its cloud dominance into software and services you’re going to lose.”
Mr. Blankenhorn is on the mark in his analysis. Google’s domination of search advertising has afforded it the cybrastructure scale and scope that no one can compete with and that can easily be repurposed to enter into and dominate any digital information or digital distribution business — almost at will.
Why so many are concerned about Google and antitrust is because of what Mr. Blankenhorn candidly asserts:
“The DOJ (book settlement) and the FTC (Google -Admob) are formally looking into Google’s attempted extension of their market power into books and mobile advertising.”
Mr. Blankenhorn is putting cloud computing on the DOJ and FTC’s antitrust radar screen too.
