By Dan Weil From Newsmax

Fred Campbell, executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology, isn’t too impressed with the efforts of Silicon Valley lobbyists to force new regulations from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

“The sudden push for new FCC regulation is not about protecting consumer privacy. It’s about protecting the Internet dominance of Google and Facebook from new competition,” the former chief of the FCC’s wireless bureau writes in an article for Forbes.

The back story is Verizon’s agreement to buy AOL for $4.4 billion. “It should be no big deal for regulators,” Campbell says.

“The FCC already announced that it won’t review the deal and there is no reason to think antitrust regulators will raise concerns. But that hasn’t stopped Silicon Valley’s advertising giants from attempting to leverage the deal into new regulations that would help them tighten their grip on Internet advertising markets.”

What Google and Facebook are worried about is competition, Campbell argues. They “dominate mobile advertising and would undoubtedly like to keep it that way.”

“The groups that are complaining about the Verizon-AOL deal — Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Center for Democracy and Technology — don’t seem to care how much consumer data Google and Facebook collect. They are only asking the FCC to regulate Verizon and other ISPs, not Google and Facebook,” he explains.

“If these groups were serious about protecting consumer privacy on the Internet, they wouldn’t be running to the FCC for special rules aimed only at Verizon. They would take their complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is the primary agency responsible for consumer privacy issues and has been dealing with online tracking issues for years.”

Elsewhere on the technology front, you have probably been reading stories about high-flying privately held companies like Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest and felt pangs of envy that you can’t get in on the fun until they go public.

Well you might already have stakes in these companies, as major money managers such as Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock and Janus have bought shares for their mutual funds.

New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin sums up the ramifications of this situation perfectly.

“The good news is that investors across a broad range are able to invest in these pseudo-private companies, democratizing, to some degree, the investment process,” he writes.

“The bad news is that should the bubble pop, these investors have already bought shares in the companies at sky-high valuations. And these people may not even realize it.”

To be sure, the holdings in these private companies make up a tiny fraction of the mutual funds’ total assets. So you may not feel much effect either way.

For more on this story go to: http://www.newsmax.com/Finance/StreetTalk/Campbell-regulation-Google-Facebook/2015/05/19/id/645495/#ixzz3ahLw6rh6

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