Android

T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere and Sprint’s Executive Chairman Marcelo Claure discussed at length their combined company’s plans for 5G deployment if the government approves their merger.

If proponents of network neutrality, an Internet non-discrimination principle, truly care about preventing discrimination on the Internet, why do they turn a blind eye to the worst offender of gatekeeper discrimination on the Internet – Alphabet-Google?

As more evidence comes to light exposing Google’s much increased search and Android dominance in the U.S. since the FTC closed its search and Android antitrust probes in January 2013, it only becomes clearer that the FCC’s AllVid proposed rulemaking to “Unlock the [set-top] Box” is obviously anticompetitive overall, not pro-competitive as the FCC naively claims.

Since Google chose that apt metaphor, and boasted about how easy Google makes it to “check out” your private data and “leave” to a competitor, lets test if you can ever “in fact leave” Google-Eye’s pervasively invasive online surveillance — from a privacy perspective.

The European Commission has charged Alphabet-Google with abusing its dominance in the market for “general Internet search services,” by implementing an Android “strategy of mobile devices to preserve and strengthen its dominance in general Internet search.” The EU objects to a variety of secret Google contract conditions to manufacturer licenses to leverage the dominant (>90% share) Android OS to secretly restrict and foreclose competition in ways that ultimately harm consumer choice and innovation. The EU effectively charged that Google has already anticompetitively extended its >90% dominance in search to dominance in the >90% share of the “licensable smart mobile operating system,” and to dominance in the >90% share of the “app stores for the Android” market.

And that, in a nutshell, is the lion’s share of Google’s business model. And business – is booming. Google is worth a net $350 billion. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Denmark – is $342 billion.

Google’s dominant search engine + its dominant Android operating system (OS) + its world-leading Chrome web browser + its uniquely-comprehensive, Internet utility functionality of193 products, services and tools = a virtual Google “Inner-net” regime.

iven Google-YouTube, the world’s dominant Internet video distribution platform with ~1.6 billion viewers in 70 countries and 75 languages covering 95% of the world’s population, and given Google-Android is the world’s dominant mobile operating system with >80% share, the only thing Google lacks in the Internet video business is a willingness to pay a market-negotiated rate for the licenses and rights to use and profit from the world’s most valuable video content, and to be a responsible corporate steward to protect the premium content from the devaluation of piracy.

Google is cleverly and stealthily leveraging a Google-friendly-FCC and lax U.S.-Google antitrust enforcement to extend its global Android mobile operating system dominance to increasingly disintermediate and dominate the spectrum administration function embedded in the firmware of smartphones, connected cars, and Internet of Things devices.

Most have missed entirely the broader significance of the EC-DGComp’s laser-focused Google Statement of Objections (that charge Google is dominant in search and is abusing that dominance in Google Shopping by self-dealing via preferencing Google content over competitors’ content) in the broader context of the EU’s new “platform neutrality” principle to advance a European Single Digital Market.

Google’s creeping militarization means Big Brother Inc. aspires to work more closely with Big Brother government.

Why are European Commission antitrust authorities bending over backwards to settle with Google? The EU’s apparent preference for settling, rather than prosecuting Google for antitrust violations, turns a blind eye…