Google Could Soon Control Your TV

Deep Throat’s advice to Woodward and Bernstein was never so true. If you want to understand what’s happening in politics, “follow the money.”

In an Op-Ed piece for The NY Post, Ev Erhlich says consider this new FCC proposal to mandate rules for set-top boxes in your home. Even though you have never had so many options and choices for video, the FCC wants to require you to add a second box inside your home. Why? To help Google distribute television.

Today, you can get TV from cable or satellite, as well as Netflix, Roku, Apple and all sorts of other companies competing for your dollar. So why does Google deserve an FCC handout to get into the TV business — especially when every other company competing in this space has managed to do so without an FCC leg up? Follow the money.

Ev Erhlich

While the FCC says such a rule will promote retail competition in set-top boxes, a leading Wall Street analyst, Jason Bazinet, recently looked at the economic fallout from this idea and found that the mandate is really about a massive transfer of huge chunks of the TV business to tech companies like Google — essentially a government giveaway that will pile new monopolies on Google’s already heaping plate and give it a back door into the TV business without negotiating for programming or paying a dime for the rights.

Promoting set-top box “competition” — as proponents of the rule claim they want to do — is merely a decoy.

How does the FCC’s proposal do that? To start, according to Erhlich, it would allow Google to “scrape” all the programming running into your home and relay it through its own box. Then Google can serve you up its own ads, track your viewing habits and bury disfavored shows in its mysterious search algorithms.

It can also gain access to valuable revenue streams like on demand, digital-rights licensing, home-shopping services and more.

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