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.
Indeed, it seems only a matter of time before powerbrokers with vested interests begin leveraging. Cases in point: Google veep
Now you may commence to stone-throwing. (Sorry for all the parenthetical references.)
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 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.
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.
Scholars Push For Search Engine Regulation
1 views
Comments (0)
Please sign in to leave a comment.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!