Wired reports on Sony’s decision to side with Google in a highly contentious lawsuit between Google and rivals Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon.
The lawsuit centers around privacy concerns and the fact it would give Google monopoly-like status on book rights that would be impossible for other companies to acquire without their own lawsuit.
Worse for Google, the Department of Justice is also investigating the settlement–a rather ominous and foreboding development.
I have never been all that positiviely impressed with Sony; they are probably the only company with a hand in consumer electronics and entertainment (the latter through their acquisition of Columbia Tri-Star in 1989 and CBS Records in 1987). The second DVD player my mom ever bought was a Sony, and it was the first to fail; the RCA player purchased a few months before still works today as far as I know. It has always seemed to me that Sony built up a good reputation in its early days, and somehow managed to keep it afloat enough to justify some kind of premium pricing even though the reputation it has is probably less deserved today.
Still, today, I’d really like to give Sony the benefit of the doubt. Yes, even though this is the same Sony known for the doomed Betamax and Digital 8 videotape formats, and the XCP and MediaMax copy protection scandal of 2005.
I don’t know much of the details and motivation behind why Sony would back Google. I do know that it’s Very Bad to let any one company grow to an effective monopoly; there is a reason we have the Sherman Anti-Trust act in the US and why similar legislation and oversight exists in the EU and elsewhere. And this does smell like something Sony would do not out of concern for its customers, but for its own corporate interests. I also believe we, as a society, should not reward a company that puts shareholders above customers when filing amicus briefs in these legal chess games.
Maybe my instinct is off the mark yet again, but it is what it is.