Summary: Microsoft's anti-Google lobby exposed yet again in another place

TAST WEEK we wrote about the anti-Google "whisper campaign", which is just the latest among a relentless wave of attacks that consistently come from Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Microsoft harasses Google by paying or strongly encouraging (through incitement) others to do so. Well, Microsoft keeps getting caught. The latest:

Google Critic Paid By Microsoft

[...]

While Cleland asserts that his testimony reflects his personal views and not the views of his clients, Google sympathizers wonder if his new affiliation with Microsoft might further fuel what they believe is an already staunchly anti-Google agenda. Last December, Precursor issued a report alleging that Google "is by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth," the company's share of bandwidth usage is rising rapidly, and it's bandwidth use "is orders of magnitude greater than its payment for its cost." Google's telecom counsel Richard Whitt responded to the attack, calling the report "payola punditry." Google Associate General Counsel Nicole Wong will testify Thursday, presumably in defense of her firm's practices.

PR Watch called this stunt "Another Kind of Payola Pundit," to which it added mostly fragments from the report above.

"Telecommunications analyst Scott Cleland, whose work is bankrolled by companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, also signed on as a hired gun for Microsoft earlier this year," reports National Journal. Cleland is "a frequent critic of Google" who "runs Precursor, an industry research and consulting firm, and chairs NetCompetition.org, which he describes as 'a pro-competition e-forum funded by broadband companies.'"

This is important to us because Microsoft also pays a lot of money for companies to attack GNU/Linux. SCO is a good example, but there are more.

What will the government do about these vicious attacks from a monopoly abuser? Obviously nothing because it's in Microsoft's pocket [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Fred Williams remarks: "The DOJ is owned by Microsoft. They will do nothing! It would take an act of God to get them to pry their lips of Microsoft's butt. Is it OK to say butt?" GreyGeek then replies:

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Microsoft OWNS Obama and most of both major political parties, thanks to their "campaign contributions" and the LACK of ethics by all parties concerned. Hardly 6 months in office and Obama has backpeddled on so many of his oft-repeated campaign promises those who voted for him are beginning to feel used, and those who campaigned for him feel more like they've become members of the first profession.

If the TRIPS FOR JUDGES website is any indication, judges are treated to luxury "seminars" hosted by PR firms financed by Microsoft and other monopoly interest where the judges are taught HOW to circumvent the anti-trust laws in their rulings.

The one under antitrust scrutiny is now Google, not Microsoft. This is what happens when the watcher becomes dominated by that whom it is supposed to watch [1, 2].

Microsoft has many reasons to fear Google. Microsoft is now relying on Google to advertise a Google rival and Google -- unlike Microsoft -- does not suffer much from the bad economy. In fact, ComScore shows that Google keeps climbing in the latest survey.

Google actually saw a 0.8 percent increase in its May over April numbers, taking 65 percent of the searches conducted. Yahoo came in at 20.1 percent, Microsoft sites 8 percent, Ask Network 3.9 percent and AOL captured 3.1 percent. Bing's share of U.S. use rose 0.8 percent.

Nielsen's numbers look even more impressive as they show Microsoft losing 14% in the latest report.

Microsoft's search engine suffered a steep usage drop in May, right before the company launched Bing, a new version of its search engine, according to the latest market share figures from Nielsen Online.

As the links at the bottom ought to show, no matter how much PR and disinformation Microsoft spreads ($100,000,000 gets spent on advertising, which is essentially deception and imposed ignorance), Bing already suffers from growing pains. In addition, regulators ought to look at how Microsoft deliberately deceives people by messing about with search results. As one reader told us yesterday, "searching for 'knoppix' on Bing ~1 mil results, searching for 'ubuntu' ~100k results. They are totally censoring their results."

It was the same with MSN/Live, which uses the same underlying engine. It is broken and biased by design, so no wonder Microsoft would even pay people to use it [1, 2]. It's advertising/propaganda, not a gateway to information. They need only tweak results about software. There is little or no need to hand-tweak the rest (e.g. food, hardware, celebrities) because that has no substantial effect on Microsoft business, not directly anyway. It's like packet throttling for competitive reasons, only worse. ⬆

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