google skeptic

Emphasis added.  Remember when trying to sell something you didn’t own was, like, illegal?

NEW YORK–Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was coy about exactly why he isn’t thrilled with Google’s attempt to forge its way into the digital publishing business.

“We have strong opinions about that issue which I’m not going to share,” Bezos said to interviewer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference. “But, clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited.”

In a court battle rife with twists, turns, and delays, Google has been attempting to push forward its Book Search initiative, which could potentially give the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant exclusive access to digital editions of some out-of-print books. That could, as Levy pointed out, get in the way of Amazon’s goal of offering every book ever printed in every language on the Kindle and its new, bigger Kindle DX sibling. And it sounds like that’s where Amazon has some beef.

“There are many forces of work looking at that and saying it doesn’t seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights,” Bezos said.

[more] via Bezos: We’ve got issues with Google Book Search | The Social – CNET News.

Welcome to Google’s real business:

Privacy study shows Google’s eyes are everywhere.

A U.C. Berkeley report shows that most Internet users don’t understand web site privacy policies, and that major online businesses like Google Inc. freely gather data and share it with affiliated businesses via loopholes in those policies.

Using trackers called “web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many popular web sites, and sites often allow this, even though their privacy policies say they don’t share user data with others.

“Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the study,” the authors found.

Sites with the most web bugs were for blogging — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in March, and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3.

Ashkan Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez of the university’s information school wrote the study, published Monday.

It’s a ‘third party’ and everyone’s invited

They analyzed privacy policies posted on web sites and found loopholes used by many site operators to allow third parties to still collect data on who views pages. They also found, for example, that although web sites may reassure visitors that “we don’t share data with third parties,” those third parties don’t include a company’s affiliates — Google, for example, has 137 subsidiary businesses.

“The law on affiliate sharing generally is more permissive” than that on sharing user data with third party companies, the report said.

Companies controlling the top 50 busiest web sites had an average of 297 affiliates each, meaning they could share user data with a lot of other companies. Popular site MySpace, for example, is owned by New York’s News Corp., which has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte has more than 2,300 subsidiaries.

“Users do not know and cannot learn the full range of affiliates with which websites may share information,” the report said.

Web bugs everywhere

Though many Internet users are familiar with “cookies” used to study their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-called “web bugs,” which can’t be cleared out of a web browser, since they are part of a web site’s HTML code.

Since the web bugs are created directly by third parties, their use doesn’t strictly count as “sharing” of data by the web site’s owner, though users concerned about privacy may be unimpressed by this technicality.

“We believe that this practice contravenes users’ expectations; it makes little sense to disclaim formal information sharing, but allow functionally equivalent tracking with third parties,” the report said.

Who’s in charge of privacy?

Although surveys of Internet users show people are “very concerned about privacy and do not want websites to collect and share their personal information without permission,” sifting through privacy policies is not practical. It would take 200 hours a year for a typical person to read the privacy policies of all the web sites they visit, for example.

Thus “users have no practical way of knowing with whom their data will be shared.”

[more] via Privacy study shows Google’s eyes are everywhere – San Francisco Business Times:.

Nice trademark ya got there.  Be a shame if it got hijacked….

Google encourages advertisers to purchase other companies’ trademarks as targeted search terms. And they’re expanding the practice into 190 countries. Is that fair use or a protection racket?

[snip case study]

For its part, Google says the plan is legitimate, even if trademark holders don’t like it. But even if it’s not a trademark infringement, “it certainly smells of a protection racket,” said attorney Terrence Ross, who represented American Airlines in its own trademark infrngement claim against Google. That case was settled.

I know of several companies spending millions of dollars a year in payments to Google to make sure that their company is the very first sponsored link.

Bryan Wiener agrees: “There is no question that it is going to increase Google’s revenue,” Mr. Wiener said. He said that companies that offer products or services, like computer makers or hotel chains, may not like the new policy because it will force them to place higher bids to advertise on searches for their own brand names.

This is a problem purely because of Google’s market dominance. You have to be obsessed with your ranking on Google and you have to be on top. If Google is selling the use of a company’s trademark to its competors and there is no other game in town, you really have no choice but pay Google’s price. That’s the beauty of a monopolistic position: You name the price, they have to pay.

[more] via Class action lawsuit says Google’s sales of keywords illegal | ZDNet Government | ZDNet.com.