“As we become increasingly dependent on the Internet, we need to be increasingly concerned about how it is regulated,” Adam Raff writes in his op-ed piece for yesterday’s “The New York Times.” Raff’s statement relates to the Federal Communications Committee considering regulations that would foster “network neutrality” — ensuring fair access to all Internet content from service providers. The importance of network neutrality seems obvious to me, a matter of fact.
Another matter of fact is that when I went to more fully investigate Raff’s op-ed piece, I did so with a Google search. Like many, I depend on Google as the gateway to the vast majority of the information I encounter on the Web. This, I realize, could lead to my own intellectual undoing and, according to Raff, could lead to the undoing of many businesses.
According to Raff, co-founder the Internet technology firm Foundem, Google dominates 71 percent of the United States search market. Raff says that Google dramatically influences the flow of information by how the search engine presents results. Results are governed by Google’s editorial policies (that have no external oversight). These policies can help one company thrive (e.g. one owned by or connected to Google), while helping to ensuring that another company fails (e.g. a Google competitor).
Raff explains:
“One way that Google exploits this control is by imposing covert ‘penalties’ that can strike legitimate and useful Web sites, removing them entirely from its search results or placing them so far down the rankings that they will in all likelihood never be found. For three years, my company’s vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.”
This should give us all pause.
Even if Raff is wrong about Google “disappearing” his company, his lucid op-ed piece has reminded me that Continue reading “Why We Need to Be Wary of Google”