Consumer: 1, Google: 4556788890

“I guess they made it official today.   Let’s examine what this means:

- Google made $10B in 2006 revenues, 99.9% from search.
- If Google could generate revenues from another revenue stream, it would welcome it.
- Google could not generate meaningful revenues from paid downloads, so it is going completely free.
- By buying YouTube, Doubleclick (not closed yet) and Feedburner, it has already decided what its next billion dollar revenue stream will be: more ads, but in lieu of it all coming from paid search, it will be videos, display/banner/rich media and feeds/emails.

Folks, mark this week as the week where consumers made it official and defeated paid content.  Both the NY Times and Wall Street Journal this week announced or considered making their sites free (or more free).

Part of this, of course, has to do with there not being a viable micropayment system.  But maybe because advertising is shifting so aggressively online is the reason why we don’t have a viable micropayment system, and not the other way around.

This is why all of those projections about the future of paid content are, for lack of better words, full of it.”

Via Hip Mojo Via Ashkan Karbasfroos

Chairman of the FCC Kevin Martin

Eh…. Not really. Wow that was by far the longest title yet. Well so it happened today, we all new it was going to happen, the 700mhz frequency was approved today by the FCC . The 700mhzland has been long sought after frequency for the great distances it can reach. Since Google wants to melt there doughy little hands into every aspect of every market they said, “Hey lets buy a Radio frequency”. Don’t quote them on that, they probably said something a lot more sophisticated and in-depth.
Now all in all this approval really isn’t that bad, but only if the FCC keeps to its “Open Access” plan. But the FCC being a part of our government we never know who’s hand might get greased to push a vote or favor through. A total of 60 megahertz will be auctioned off, with twenty-two of them “open,” and another 10 set aside for a “national public safety” network. The auctioning off of the frequency is expected to raise as much as $15 billion for the federal treasury.

The auction begins sometime early next year, and so it begins…..

I wanted to give a little info out about Chairman Kevin Martin, and who he has worked for, and what he did in the past. Here is the excerpt about him from the official FCC website:

“Chairman Martin was nominated by President George W. Bush to a Republican seat on the Commission, and was sworn in on July 3, 2001. He was designated chairman by President Bush on March 18, 2005. Chairman Martin was re-nominated for a second term as commissioner and chairman by President George W. Bush on April 25, 2006.

Before joining the FCC, Martin was a Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. He served on the Bush-Cheney Transition Team and was Deputy General Counsel for the Bush campaign. Prior to joining the campaign, Martin was an advisor to FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth. He has also served in the Office of the Independent Counsel and worked as an associate at the Washington, DC law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding. Before joining Wiley, Rein & Fielding, Martin was a judicial clerk for U.S. District Court Judge William M. Hoeveler, Miami, FL.

Martin received a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Masters in Public Policy from Duke University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the Federal Communications Bar Association.”

Now Chairman Martin is no virgin when it comes to ethic scandals, does anyone remember the Bellsouth & AT&T merger?

I never try to mix politics with technology but sometimes they just mix , and a lot of the time it ends up in a negative manner. So that is why I am so skeptical of this “Open Access” plan. Now I am not saying Google even has the cash flow to play the game, if it stays open I hope they have the cash on hand. I just hope the FCC plays nice with everyone and does not play favors.

Can anyone give me a reason to not think like this?

Dave Winer writes a post on why Feedburner is in trouble after being acquired by Google. I never really looked at Google’s acquisition of Feedburner in the same light Dave does and I’m glad he wrote what he did as it is certainly a real eye opener in regards to the level of control Google is “acquiring” on the internet. By the way, Dave is the RSS God. Anyway, here’s quote from Dave that really creeps me out:

“So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone.”

So my question is should we begin using Feedburner here on this new site? We’re still in our infancy but if Feedburner is going to cause us problems with our readers in the future - I think its better to fight those problems now rather than when we build up readership in the future. If we choose to ditch Feedburner, all of our RSS subscribers would then have to re-subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed after ditching Feedburner. It could be a mess. So I am asking what readers we do have currently - should we ditch Feedburner now and avoid any problems that may arise in the future?