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Comment by rashomon | Hacker News Reader

Google's corporate motto is "Don't be Evil" and the United States has the 16th fastest broadband speeds in the world, and we invented the damn thing. Comcast, I agree, is a terrible monopolistic crack-baby of the capitalist society but Google is genuinely improving things.

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What good is a corporate motto if the shareholders can't sue to enforce it? Some good, sure. I always liked it. But it is about as binding as it is well-defined.

Except Google has been acting pretty 'evil' recently.

The disgraceful FRAND abuses, the privacy abuses, the anti-competitive expansion of Google Search. Hence why they are under multiple investigations by ITC, EU, US governments.

So it is far better to assume NOBODY should be trusted.

Except again: In Google vs AT&T, Comcast et al, I'll take Google any day of the week. Their "evil" is a bunch of shit that nobody really cares about, whereas the others actively screw me, running fiber optic cables straight into my apartment and then making sure that even the priciest data plan I can buy is rate limited to the equivalent of mid-2000s DSL.

> The disgraceful FRAND abuses

When has Google, in and of itself, abused FRAND? The only actions I know of happening on FRAND patents are things grandfathered in from motorola - are you blaming those on Google? I think it's far too early to judge Google's behavior wrt to patents. We have to see what they do in their own right.

Google has explicitly endorsed Moto's FRAND policy that many people consider abusive. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

I'm curious what you consider (or believe other people consider) abusive about that?

For example, all of the H.264 patents except Motorola's are licensed for pennies, which is something like 0.25% of the cost of an Xbox. But Motorola wants ~2% for their few H.264 patents. A complex product infringes hundreds of patents; if each one has a 2% royalty then the total royalties exceed the price of the product.

That's certainly an argument that could be had but Google's position on it is not in the document you cited. It specifies that the maximum royalty Google will ever ask for a standards essential patent is 2%. Whether Google approves of asking for 2% in the case you are referring to is not clear to me.

At this point the law suit is way past the phase of negotiating licensing fees and I doubt very much that it is possible to rewind it back to there even if Google wanted to (which I don't see why they would; they know that Apple is intent on banning their devices - Apple's goal is nothing less than the complete destruction of Android as a product, not negotiating reasonable licensing fees).

Google has owned Motorola Mobility for months now and is in every respect in full control of the company. They have had plenty of opportunities to "do the right thing" but have chosen not to.

Google has owned Motorola for sixty four days.

So to be clear you're talking about the inertia regarding the Motorola suit, not any specific action taken by Google executives. So they've been "evil" for two months. I call shenanigans here: you're spinning. No one sane would indict a giant corporate entity on this kind of evidence.

The acquisition closed on May 22nd [1]. While 'months' is technically true, it barely squeaks over the bar, and really not that long when you consider that they might have other priorities, like not losing money.

Thanks for your consistent concern trolling about Google anyway.

[1] http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Google-Acquir...

the simple answer is don't use services if you don't trust them. If google provides cheaper fiber access in your area, and you'd trust verizon or comcast then use those providers.

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