November 10th, 2008
Big telecom acquiring a Google fixation
If you want to know what the telco monopolists are feeling, deep in their multi-secretaried lairs, the best place to start is with Scott Cleland.
Scott, through his Precursor blog, would like to be seen as the Karl Rove of telecom. He’s actually more the Frank Luntz.
Or to put it another way, we wanted Denzel Washington. We’d take Andre Braugher. We got Cedric the Entertainer. (Remember the Titans this wasn’t.)
Cleland’s latest is some concern-trolling over Google’s chest-thumping after it walked away from Yahoo. Bad form, he says:
If Google was trying to avoid Microsoft’s antitrust fate, they may actually have accomplished the opposite.
Short version. Ignore the real monopolists. Look at the potential one.
Beneath the surface, this is the next great business war. Telcos and cable operators and Hollywood on one side, Google and the Internet and open source on the other.
The monopolists want to maintain pricing power, and offer to bring the content industries along for the ride, to give them a taste. Google, meanwhile, still sees itself as designing a rocket, caring little for where it comes down. That’s the user’s decision.
What Google, and all of us, most need to do is work that problem, finding business models through which content owners can profit while the end-to-end integrity of the search-and-find Internet is preserved.
That will break the link between the content industries and Hollywood, end the content wars, and, eventually, leave Scott Cleland without work.
It will also make Google a ton of money.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 11/10/08
