[governance] 'search neutrality' to go with net neutrality

[Rui Correia]

And below, an article on how the need to get money for content is
forcing papers to think of revenue streams:

"Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked
about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would
pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming
produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all
search engines crawl his sites. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/business/media/28paywall.html?_r=2&em

Rui

2009/12/29 Parminder <parminder at itforchange.net>:
> See below an interesting article on how the company that seeks to 'organise
> the world's knowledge' really may be doing it. It is time we called for
> complete disclosure in public interest of search logics of Google and other
> search engine, which truly are now a (the?) principal source of information
> and knowledge globally. Also a point to ponder for those who think
> everything, including controlling excesses of market power, can be done
> bottom-up and may not need policy regimes.
>
> Parminder
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html
>
> Search, but You May Not Find
>
> By ADAM RAFF
> Published: December 27, 2009
>
> AS we become increasingly dependent on the Internet, we need to be
> increasingly concerned about how it is regulated. The Federal Communications
> Commission has proposed “network neutrality” rules, which would prohibit
> Internet service providers from discriminating against or charging premiums
> for certain services or applications on the Web. The commission is correct
> that ensuring equal access to the infrastructure of the Internet is vital,
> but it errs in directing its regulations only at service providers like AT&T
> and Comcast.
>
> Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have
> become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in
> directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of
> its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look
> beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle
> that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their
> results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.
>
> The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much
> market power lies in the hands of one company: Google. With 71 percent of
> the United States search market (and 90 percent in Britain), Google’s
> dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming
> control. Google’s revenues exceeded $21 billion last year, but this pales
> next to the hundreds of billions of dollars of other companies’ revenues
> that Google controls indirectly through its search results and sponsored
> links.
>
> 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.
>
> Another way that Google exploits its control is through preferential
> placement. With the introduction in 2007 of what it calls “universal
> search,” Google began promoting its own services at or near the top of its
> search results, bypassing the algorithms it uses to rank the services of
> others. Google now favors its own price-comparison results for product
> queries, its own map results for geographic queries, its own news results
> for topical queries, and its own YouTube results for video queries. And
> Google’s stated plans for universal search make it clear that this is only
> the beginning.
>
> Because of its domination of the global search market and ability to
> penalize competitors while placing its own services at the top of its search
> results, Google has a virtually unassailable competitive advantage. And
> Google can deploy this advantage well beyond the confines of search to any
> service it chooses. Wherever it does so, incumbents are toppled, new
> entrants are suppressed and innovation is imperiled.
>
> Google’s treatment of Foundem stifled our growth and constrained the
> development of our innovative search technology. The preferential placement
> of Google Maps helped it unseat MapQuest from its position as America’s
> leading online mapping service virtually overnight. The share price of
> TomTom, a maker of navigation systems, has fallen by some 40 percent in the
> weeks since the announcement of Google’s free turn-by-turn satellite
> navigation service. And RightMove, Britain’s leading real-estate portal,
> lost 10 percent of its market value this month on the mere rumor that Google
> planned a real-estate search service here.
>
> Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google’s competitive advantage,
> we may be heading toward a bleakly uniform world of Google Everything —
> Google Travel, Google Finance, Google Insurance, Google Real Estate, Google
> Telecoms and, of course, Google Books.
>
> Some will argue that Google is itself so innovative that we needn’t worry.
> But the company isn’t as innovative as it is regularly given credit for.
> Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Groups, Google Docs, Google Analytics,
> Android and many other Google products are all based on technology that
> Google has acquired rather than invented.
>
> Even AdWords and AdSense, the phenomenally efficient economic engines behind
> Google’s meteoric success, are essentially borrowed inventions: Google
> acquired AdSense by purchasing Applied Semantics in 2003; and AdWords,
> though developed by Google, is used under license from its inventors,
> Overture.
>
> Google was quick to recognize the threat to openness and innovation posed by
> the market power of Internet service providers, and has long been a leading
> proponent of net neutrality. But it now faces a difficult choice. Will it
> embrace search neutrality as the logical extension to net neutrality that
> truly protects equal access to the Internet? Or will it try to argue that
> discriminatory market power is somehow dangerous in the hands of a cable or
> telecommunications company but harmless in the hands of an overwhelmingly
> dominant search engine?
>
> The F.C.C. is now inviting public comment on its proposed network neutrality
> rules, so there is still time to persuade the commission to expand the scope
> of the regulations. In particular, it should ensure that the principles of
> transparency and nondiscrimination apply to search engines as well as to
> service providers. The alternative is an Internet in which innovation can be
> squashed at will by an all-powerful search engine.
>
> Adam Raff is a co-founder of Foundem, an Internet technology firm.
>
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-- 
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Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
Angola Liaison Consultant
2 Cutten St
Horison
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South Africa
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