Last week, the most powerful company in the world became even more powerful. GOOGLE, Inc. of Mountain View California, just went into the cellphone and cable TV markets, purchasing Motorola Mobility for $12.5B. Google likes you to think of them as your fuzzy, open-source buddy. They are Big Brother, a corporate BORG, constantly learning and sucking the viability out of industry.
Google has learned the lesson of monopoly stripping from Microsoft. Make yourself big and scary, and the antitrust lawyers will come calling. Be adept at looking like the public champions, and the Justice Department leaves you alone.
They have managed to plunder the advertising coin of major newspapers and magazines, advertising, and web publishing keeping the web enslaved to its vast collective. They have their sights set on dominating music, entertainment, mobile telephony and, soon, the auto industry.
Google has always tried to come off as a white knight in the public eye, even when they are doing things that clearly are motivated out of the self-interest of preserving and growing the collective.
One of Google’s acts of faux selflessness? Standing up for Net Neutrality legislation.
Internet pipeline companies, the folks who set up your access to the Internet, like an AT&T or a Comcast, act like the European river pirates of old. They all want to put their tollbooth on your digital Rhine, and make you pay to access it, or control how you use it to enrich themselves.
Google was instrumental in lobbying to block cable operators. Why? Cable tollbooths on the information superhighway would be the biggest threat to Google’s search engine business. It would force them to bid with competitors like Yahoo! to pay to be the search engine of choice when users log on to the web. That, in turn, could substantially hurt their advertising business which relies on learning your search patterns to deliver targeted marketing to you.
The Net Neutrality spat with the cable operators creates one very large hurdle for Google’s Motorola deal: They now must work with those very same companies as the new owners of Motorola Mobility, which makes set-top boxes for the cable industry.
The full story, including an interesting alternate take on why Google took on a dog with fleas like Motorola Mobility, is in my full blog.