Here’s an idea sure to start some fires: Is it necessary to consider government regulation of search engines? Please hold your throwing-stones until the end of the presentation.
Scholars Push For Search Engine Regulation
A technologically advanced century brings with it more (much more) complicated questions that may or may not be properly addressed by old arguments. Worse, the concept is still hazy in the minds of most, making it that much more difficult to address.
But the short version can be presented this way: The Search Engine Industry is one that controls access to the most valuable commodity there is in today’s society, and that commodity is information. Access to the commodity is controlled by a few key players, and mostly by Google. As there is potential for abuse, then the appropriate and necessary role of the government is to guard against that abuse.
A search engine can be defined as: an information retrieval agent; a value-judge (editor) of information; an information medium (i.e., press).
And that is troublesome. Indeed, Google steers away from whatever definition hurts it the worst in court, citing the First Amendment at times, and the Communications Decency Act at others (i.e., our opinion is free speech, or, when necessary, we have no opinion as a an interactive computer service).
We talk about Google most because it is the dominant player, and some would argue the fairest one. On the whole, though, a natural oligarchy has developed whereby a few entities control what information is viewable to the public.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the gatekeepers can be trusted. But there is an inherent possibility (and thus, temptation and motivation) that information can be manipulated to the benefit of the provider, or to the detriment of the competition.
We’ve certainly addressed this before. In 2005, I explored whether the search engines were politically biased. In that same year, searches on both Google and MSN regarding the infamous Kai-Fu Lee lawsuit revealed dramatically different results – both parties had vested interests and their results seemed to reflect that.
And earlier this week, my colleague, David Utter, dropped a new term on us: Search Neutrality. An interesting point was that Google argues (rightly, I might add) that the telecommunications industry cannot be trusted with the Internet without government oversight. Yet, Google maintains it most certainly can be trusted with our information because, well, “the company says so.”
The line between ISP and search engine, then, are effectively blurred – both act as gatekeepers to information and therefore should be, in some way, regulated to protect the people’s access to this unprecedented information availability.
You may not have heard of Frank Pasquale III, but you won’t find a more impressive résumé. Summa cum laude, Harvard; Marshall Scholar, Oxford; Coker Fellow, Yale Law. That’s my ham-fisted way of saying the dude’s pretty smart.
Pasquale and colleague Oren Bracha recently published a 60-page argument in favor of some kind of search engine regulation, overseen by a “Federal Search Commission.” Note, if you take the time to read it all, that though they make a persuasive and intuitive case in favor, Pasquale and Bracha were unable to detail how, exactly, this would be done.
They begin this way:
Though rarely thought of as a “mass medium,” search engines occupy a critical junction in our networked society. Their influence on our culture, economy, and politics may eventually dwarf that of the broadcast networks, radio stations, and newspapers. Located at bottlenecks of the information infrastructure, search engines exercise extraordinary control over data flow in a largely decentralized network. Power, as always, is accompanied by opportunities for abuse, and by concerns over its limitation to legitimate and appropriate uses.
Indeed, it seems only a matter of time before powerbrokers with vested interests begin leveraging. Cases in point: Google veep Tim Armstrong and his other company, Associated Content; Aaron Wall’s detective work revealing Google Checkout’s intimate relationship with GolfBalls.com.
And from the other side as well, as the big brands buy up high-ranking sites in order to appear multiple times in the top ten results.
So we might say, “Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire.” People on all sides are gaming the system, and it is seemingly inevitable, once Google gets further and further from its utopian ideals (remember China?), that the ability and incentive to manipulate results in their favor will exist and be acted upon.
Even if Google says that won’t happen.
And yet, and yet, to quote one of my heroes, Jorge Luis Borges, there is the free-market economy debate, which has failed to win in the face of telecommunications realities, that says the market will ultimately decide and punish businesses that would abuse their positions.
Pasquale and Bracha don’t think so and argue that personalized search, the proposed answer to search result manipulation, will merely provide better targets for which to manipulate.
They fail, however, to address another rising and powerful tide in the information economy: social networks. Unless I missed it within those powerfully presented 60 pages. I think it may be argued that the populist, uncontrollable world of social networks may act as a nice counterbalance to potential engineered algorithmic abuses – so long as the corporate owners don’t actively seek to censor their users, which is also a likelihood.
Now you may commence to stone-throwing. (Sorry for all the parenthetical references.)
