First-Ever Study of Google's Impact on Internet, Economy, Pricing & Jobs

Post date: Sep 14, 2010 4:46:28 PM

How Googleopoly Threatens Economic Recovery & Jobs in 20+ Industries

Google Increasingly is the Internet for Most Consumers

MCLEAN, Va., Sept. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today Precursor LLC released a first-of-its-kind research study on the impact of the largest and most powerful Internet company, Google Inc., on the Internet, economy, pricing and jobs. Google Inc. is expanding beyond its search monopoly to dominate other parts of the Internet at such an alarming rate that Google Inc. increasingly is the Internet for most consumers.

Precursor President Scott Cleland said:

- "There is no net-economic growth or job creation from Google's 'free' Internet sector model, only a deflationary price spiral, negative growth, property devaluation, and hundreds of thousands of job losses in over 20 industries. Consumers don't win long term from a monopoly-gatekeeper of 'free' information access and distribution."
- "Many will be amazed to learn that when Google rebrands its current YouTube-Double-Click video advertising business as 'Google TV' this fall, it already will own an Internet video-streaming monopoly with 80% of the Internet audience, almost a billion viewers, 2 billion daily monetized views, and 45 billion ads served daily."
- "Lax antitrust merger enforcement is responsible for tipping Google to monopoly and facilitating its monopolization of consumer Internet media. If antitrust authorities do not wake up soon, a wide swath of a trillion dollar sector with millions of jobs – i.e. video, maps, books, analytics, travel, etc. – will suffer the same fate as the music and newspaper industries."
- "While I expect the study to generate a healthy debate over whether Google's behavior is pro or anti-competitive, pro or anti-consumer, and pro or anti-innovation, any rigorous analysis of the facts will lead to the same conclusion of this study – that Google's exercise of its market power is spreading to many other industries and spreading at an alarming rate."

The core recommendation of the study is that the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and the European Commission's Competition Directorate should sue Google for monopolization.

About the study's author:

The study was conducted over the last few months by Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, a leading techcom research and consulting firm. (See: www.Precursor.com.)

- Formerly, Cleland was an Institutional Investor Magazine top independent telecom analyst in 2004 and 2005.
- He has a high-profile track record of being first to spot big anomalies involving the Internet.
  - - In late 2000, Cleland was the first analyst to expose that Internet traffic was in reality growing 90% slower than what the market assumed, heralding the bust of the dot.com bubble that wiped out $4 trillion in market capitalization.
    - In 2002, Cleland was the first analyst to discern that WorldCom's model did not add up and to predict its bankruptcy.
    - In 2007, Cleland was the first analyst to predict that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick would tip Google to monopoly; an assessment the DOJ affirmed in 2008 in blocking the Google-Yahoo ad agreement via a threatened monopolization case.
- A leading expert on Google, Cleland publishes two Google watchdog sites www.GoogleMonitor.com andwww.Googleopoly.net, and he has testified before both House and Senate subcommittees on Google.

The views expressed in the Googleopoly VI study are solely those of the author and not the views of any Precursor LLC clients.

The link to the Googleopoly VI study is: http://googleopoly.net/Googleopoly_VI_Presentation.pdf

The link to the Executive Summary is: http://googleopoly.net/Googleopoly_VI_Summary.pdf

The link to Cleland's Bio is: http://www.precursor.com/bio_long.htm

Precursor is an industry research and consulting firm, specializing in the converging techcom sector. Precursor offers rare forward-looking expertise and national credibility at the nexus of: capital markets, public policy and techcom industry change.www.precursor.com

SOURCE Precursor LLC