‘We’re taking a look’ at whether Google searches should be regulated
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
So, Trump, a billionaire and POTUS, with Republican majorities in both houses is a victim/ little guy? As a conservative this makes no sense.
Why would acting as a publisher lead to government content regulations? Do we not have freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution?
Section 230 is how a company can make billions selling ads for malicious sites, and not be held liable for it because they didn't technically write the malicious ads themselves. Not only would moderating the content of the ads these companies sell cost them money, but refusing to sell malicious ads would cut off profit options for them.
If Section 230 was removed, they'd have to actually take care of the business they engaged in, as they'd be responsible for promoting and participating in illegal activity.
And the suggestion that regulation hurts small companies and helps big ones is a myth generally perpetrated by those large companies. "Don't regulate us, it'll hurt the little guys" is an amazingly frequent scream of big monopolies trying to protect their business models.
Content moderation actually doesn't scale well at all, because nobody's really gotten automated content moderation right. Small companies have little to no problem moderating their comments sections or business relationships, but large tech companies actually can't do this without cutting deeply into their profit margins.
Yes, they'll use "expensive monitoring and filtering software", but those systems tend to suck, which is why so much malware and bad content comes through Google Ads and the Play Store and why Facebook's platform has been gamed in countless ways by bad actors. Automated systems present massively additional liability compared to human employees, and removing that immunity would ensure large companies couldn't just hand off moderation to an algorithm.
Facebook less so, and Twitter even less so. Access to information is vital, access to your cousin's birthday photos and the blatherings of idiots who like to shout out into the ether probably less vital.
I'm not a fan of regulation but as a consumer I'm absolutely within my rights to ask Google tough questions.
That is clearly false.
Imagine if the Google shareholders decided that someone like Trump would make a good Google CEO; paralleling the US move from Obama to Trump in one election cycle. It would be very worrying.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/17/google-was-against-trump-now...
Further, what happens if Google were to prove that it's search algorithm were completely politically neutral (which is obviously non-sense because that statement doesn't mean anything.) What do we do then?
Should we also look at New York Times? What if they are posting too many liberal viewpoints?
Google effectively has three monopolies (or near monopolies): search, YouTube, Android.
I include YouTube because in their user-video / amateur-video space they have an overwhelming position, there's nothing even remotely close (Facebook is still a poor competitor, and will probably never capture the higher quality amateur content).
Just a naive idea but personally, I'd say a platform is politically neutral if it takes no action to prioritise or remove content unless required by law. This puts what should and shouldn't be on the platform in the hands of lawmakers, who, theoretically at least, represent the will of the people.
However that's bad for business so I'm under no illusions it'll ever become reality.
Let's say a far right conspiracy blog is posting a conspiracy about a school shooting before any information is really available. Suddenly, it's on top of Google and being surfaced prominently on Facebook.
People don't like this because these neutral companies are now promoting fake, definitely potentially harmful stories.
But if you penalize them for this, from one viewpoint, you are suppressing political opinion.
That's with a conspiracy; but if you drag the slider backwards, you find that there's no actual tipping point where it's clear action should be taken. Further, what if the far right has more conspiracy theorist than the far left? It would be partisan to not run fake news!
Going more subtle, bias in algorithms is a thing. Like PageRank is based on the number of high quality links to your page, right? What happens when rightwing views are underrepresented because their network of links is naturally considered less high quality due to being less linked around the web?
And if you think people would never make arguments like this, try to remember how often people fight over the correlation of politics and population density. It's why the United States has a Senate and a House.
Google, in particular, did not, because web crawler results are not user-submitted content and thus are not within the scope of the CDA safe harbor.
They are, instead protected from libel a way that is open to, and frequently used by, newspapers: they mostly (i.e., in the form of search results) report what amounts to “X person said Y”, which is (to the extent it is true, whether or not Y is true) absolutely protected from libel in the US. And that would be true even if they preferentially promoted (or even exclusively carried) content favorable to (or, alternatively, disfavorable to) one viewpoint.
The disagreement is the amount of regulation, and where to draw the line.
Though this is the idealized version of reality. In actuality, there are of course a host of political reasons conservatives may want more regulation in some places, and vice versa.
The government makes Coke list the ingredients and nutrition facts, but doesn't make them reveal the secret formula. Maybe there's a similar way to regulate Search?
I really don't see any kind of innate difference in the amount of regulation actually preferred by either half of america. If someone who downvoted the other comment would like to offer a thoughtful rebuttal or data to support their view I would be happy to consider it.
It is not clear to me that there is any disagreement on the amount. I know that the conservative claim is that they want less regulation but how do you measure that?
There are a host of things conservative policitians seek to regulate that liberal ones tend not to. There are even huge socialist programs that conservative politicians support more than liberal ones (like the military)
Since we are going to have our lives more and more influenced by the results of algorithms, should we regulate them or not ? If yes, how ? How do you appeal to a decision made by a machine ?
I don't think there is any easy answer to these questions.
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
Maybe you want to be able to appeal to a machine made decision and that it should be reviewed by a human at some point ? But maybe not, at some point, changing your name is probably easier.
"The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society." ―Vint Cerf
I reserve a special level of contempt for people who think they can "fix" society by using force or authority to control how other people think, speak, and feel.
The problem now is that google and facebook have such a dominant position that larry page and zuckerburg can decide what to show us and what not to show us. They essentially hold the mirror and they decide what we get to see.
Vint Cerf's internet is the one I grew up with and the one I believe in. With the rise of social media and monopolistic tech companies, the relatively uncensored decentralized internet has turned into a dystopian curated and centralized one.
Now replace “voting” with “posting” and you’re pretty close to how modern social media works.
There is always talk about how google promotes this or that by having this search return X and how they should adjust it. They always "adjust the algorithm" or ban sites from their search results entirely.
Google's search is better (I've tired and use others..) and thus it wields enormous power. This puts them at odds with governments that always want to control information. I'm sure if they could the whitehouse could make its own "search engine" but people wouldn't trust it.
edit: removed my "good luck with that". The US currently has a poor track record of controlling large corporations because of lobbies etc.
Google does not need or deserve the ability to keep the way all human knowledge is accessed and found today a trade secret.
Additional notes on this to address the obvious criticisms:
- Google would still have the benefit of it's actual data/crawled content that presumably would not be disclosed and constitutes a significant portion of their business advantages.
- It's unlikely competing search engines would somehow leapfrog Google's technology by having access to their search ranking algorithms. At best copying Google would make them "as good as Google", but you need to be "better than" to get people to switch or offer features and benefits they don't.
- Even if all of Google's data and algorithms were cloned by competitors, everyone would still by and large use Google because Google is the default on almost every platform and browser, and Google has a significant lock-in effect over their platforms.
Which is to say, requiring one of the world's most powerful monopolies to disclose the algorithms by which knowledge is found would have minimal to non-existent impact on their business but have significant benefit to society.
The US government is able to enforce sanctions on other governments, crushing their economies and major businesses. It's able to acquire private property and businesses through eminent domain. "Good luck with that" is a bit shortsighted. The tools exist for the US to exert these forces, and they have been used successfully.
The US tends to treat its own companies with kid gloves and tends not to put the hammer down on billion dollar companies with their all important lobbyists.
Well I like to think they do want to improve the results.
You're assuming that because they can't do it, they won't.
You forget that these people are making the laws. They can just vote a law that "the internet must be curated, and uphold standards X and Y".
Then they simply force providers to block anything that isn't perfectly curated at the simple request to a court.
Done/done.
So they can simply force others to do it. They can simply force self-censorship (see GPDR, and why that law is such a horrible thing). Congress can't check food for safety, so they make others do it (e.g. the FDA doesn't check food safety (except where it has already gone wrong), it forces vendors to check it, then does a basic sanity check on the report of said check, same is true in Europe, except for the name of the organization).
If your premise is that Breitbart and the New York Times have equal "quality" as news reporting organizations, and are equally partisan, and the only thing separating them is their political bent, then yes, it looks like Google is stacking the deck in favor of news organizations that you've categorized as leftist.
In reality, what's happening is that Google's algorithm favors trustworthy news sources over untrustworthy ones, and the right has branded "factual news we don't like" as partisan.
[1] https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...
[2] https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/20...
https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors
https://www.google.com/search?q=american+mathematicians
https://www.google.com/search?q=american+scientists
Image results:
https://www.google.com/search?q=european+art+history&tbm=isc...
One of the biggest problems with Google as I see it, and facebook for that matter, is for the end user there isn't much of a way to introspect _why_ a search result comes from a particular query. In this case, you used that lack of information to confirm your own assumptions and bias.
This situation is a good example of why it's important to pay attention to maintaining the appearance of impartiality as well as actually being impartial.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. Nothing related to search.)
This is one of the social dangers of allowing algorithms to make important decisions in society. We might not even be aware of what biases we're introducing. They can be very non-obvious, especially if the algorithm is complex or the data set is large.
Edit: here's another possible explanation: perhaps due to efforts to popularize African American contributions to American history there are more web pages (in a pure numeric sense) about African American inventors, scientists, etc. on the web. This could affect the way Google weights search results.
This isn't a danger of AI in the future, it's a danger of google's algorithms in the present. Most users (myself included) have come to treat Google results as some oracle of truth, so the bias introduced by Google's existing search algorithms can have tremendous impact. Most of the time it will go unnoticed, and it doesn't require any intentional manipulation. What people know, and how they act based on what they know, is being heavily influenced already by google's algorithms.
It's pretty common for certain words in certain image searches to be useless, and that's including a lot of very boring searches nobody has ever thought of.
This would seem to both belie the claim that it is manipulating the results -- by virtue of the fact that wouldn't the first thing they manipulate away be this very criticism -- and seriously taint the chain of events that led you to claim that they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_inventors
There is a sub category called "African American inventors". Since the sub category also match the search terms, it is possible that for some reason they are displayed in priority.
edit : the post of econ4all about "us+inventor" tend to confirm that it is an issue with "american" being part of "african american"
IF (a big IF) Google was actually biased, you could go to their competitor. But if there's no other real competitor then IMO the solution isn't to regulate Google, but to fix root cause problems which led to there only being one company controlling all search (AKA breaking up the monopoly)
The question is not should Google be regulated (as a new form of utility) but who should regulate it, and under what terms of reference.
An American regulator? European? Chinese ? A new form of UN based regulator for new forms of multi national company? Should it be laissez faire? What views on privacy should the regulator have - is it a price based privacy or an inalienable right?
God knows. But she ain't telling.
What google does is privatise a public good (our markup and usage of internet) - that seems a strong case for regulation irrespective of the very small amount of competition
It is also worth remembering that gas and electric companies also were seen as "not essential" for a long time, as many people managed the old way - there just came a tipping point where the value and convenience (and economic / social benefits) were so great the old ways died out and suddenly a significant proportion of society was dependent. Humans have lived without electrical supplies for many years just as we managed without search engines - but at some point it was "better" for everyone to have electricity, and so everyone got it and we don't want to go back.
US military doctrine of "shock and awe" talks about "bombing people back to the stone age" by destroying electricity and water supplies- when really they mean bombing people back to the early victorian era. But from the vantage point of a man sitting on the loo using a electrically powered internet device, 1840s and the neolithic don't seem very far apart.
Please don’t throw around terms incorrectly. That’s not what “public good” means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
Trump doesn't address other search engines though, which (hilariously) helps Google more than the threat of looming regulations hurts them. Getting attacked by Trump is a badge of honor at this point. Just about any liberal or conservative with a brain will realize only regulating Google's results is a very bad move when there is Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.
How exactly is trump promoting censorship here? Isn't he doing the exact opposite? Isn't he promoting free speech?
And frankly, I think it's great that the media and the president have an adversarial relationship. The president should attack the media ( free speech ) and the media should attack the president ( free press ). Why would you want the president and the media having a cozy relationship?
I can't think of a greater symbol of democracy and free speech than the president and the media keeping each other in check.
The media and president should be adversaries, not friends. I'd rather the media tell us everything the president is doing wrong and shining the spotlight on him and vice versa. And this isn't just about republicans. I wish the media would be more adversarial with the democrats as well. With all politicians. It's a great way to keep politicians honest.
Regarding the media, there's nothing wrong with the president and the media having an adversarial relationship and in fact I think that's the norm. But I wouldn't describe a president attacking the media as promoting free speech.
What if Google holds a monopolistic position in the search market, and its actions are detrimental to its users? What if what the government is doing is enforcing anti-trust rules?
Anyway even if that were found to be the case (and arguably there's a good case) I don't know if the likely remedy would be to allow the government to control search results.
If the government wants to meddle with search results the better approach might be from the FCC which could claim Google needs to operate under some kind of common carrier status I guess.
We are talking about a president who routinely threatens punitive government actions against detractors. There exists a line between criticizing bad journalism, and using executive powers to threaten critics. The later is what dictators do.
In the case of Google, they maintain their search algorithm is not politically biased. Unless we have substantive evidence proving otherwise I see no reason not to believe them.
It seems what Trump is suggesting here, is a government regime controlling what search results we see... That is a very scary prospect, right now.
I have a brother working as a journalist, who toils away fact checking, all day long. I can assure you he and his colleagues do way more due-diligence, fact-checking, and gathering of supporting evidence, than the Office of the Press Secretary could even try to pretend to.
It's so easy to get up in a press-conference say something patently false, when you don't allow any dissent.
If you don't like criticism it's "Fake News".
If you can't see what Trump is doing when he calls the media "Anti-American", you have the wool over your eyes. It's dictator 101.
Checks and balances require the separate branches to be willing to apply them. With the apparent lack of any meaningful oversight by the legislature, it does not seem like the checks and balances are working very effectively.
I suppose that's a strong reason why many (including myself) prefer divided governments, so that adversaries can keep each other from going too far.
I don't remember where I read it, but something like this rings true: the founders anticipated authoritarians seeking power, but they did not anticipate legislators allowing it.
Edit: I don't mean to say that Trump becoming a dictator in the US is possible; I think that's extremely unlikely. I simply mean that there is a weakness in the US political system when government is controlled entirely by one party, and that this weakness could possibly be exploited some day.
Now, they just head straight for the front door themselves: “we don't like (what we perceive as) the political viewpoint on Google results, so we’re considering regulating it so that they have to say what we’d prefer”.
Short of the kind of coordinated activity with a campaign that would be an illegal contribution (which Trump should know plenty about, since he's been directly implicated in it with regard to AMI and the payoff to cover up his affair with Karen McDougal), even if Google's presentation was deliberately, partisanly, politically biased, that would be core free speech/press protected by he first Amendment.
https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1034416321226784768?ref... "The full segment, btw, is on Fox's website. If you're a journalist writing up the president's tweets, you should really explain where the president is getting his ideas."
These are the actions we’re used to seeing from oppressive dictatorships, but seeing them from the President of the United States is nuts.
The vast majority of major accredited news media is negative towards Trump, ergo searches mostly reflect that. Shocking revelation.
Anyway we live in a free country and the government can't dictate what kind of news a search engine should surface.
It's ironic though that newspapers are actually entertaining this nonsense and not outright debunking the notion and highlighting how dangerous it is.
I am surprised that anyone is still listening to that guy.
But we're doing this one.
So long as the government fails to act, they're supporting the monopolies in question. So long as those monopolies exist, what they're doing is called censorship. As monopolies they have the direct sanction of the state.
Bring on the trust-busting.
This is going to be interesting because recent moves by social media and tech companies have shifted them from a distribution platform to publisher which opens up an incredible amount of liability issues.
As much as I dislike Trump, I think recent moves by the tech industry were awful misteps. The extremes they went to and the obvious stifling of right wing voices really hurt their reputation and now opens them up for heavy regulation.
I use to feel that social media and tech were biased but fair or tried very hard to be fair. Now it's hard to trust anything ( posts, tweets, search results ) because these platforms have no fairness in them.
Normally, competition would be a deterrent against unfairness, but the days of excite, yahoo, askjeeves, altavista, etc competing with google are over. What else is left but regulation?
Breitbart is a traffic juggernaut in the US, and Google has Aljazeera ranking on the second page along with dailymail.co.uk. No Breitbart anywhere to be found on the first 15 pages. All the far left results are there of course.
IMDB is on page four. Haaretz on page five. France24 is on page five. TMZ, People.com, PageSix, UrbanDictionary, PopSugar are all there....
Along with this glorious headline on page six of results: "What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987? - NYMag"
There's very obvious bias across the board. Every platform is simultaneously conspiring (ie working together) to throw far right voices off their sites while leaving their counterpoints on the far left entirely alone (even when those people blatantly violate the platform terms of service). Just another good reason to begin very aggressively regulating the monopolists.
So long as they possess monopolies, they are in fact committing censorship. And when they all act as a group politically to censor, even more so. It's time for the government to act.
Just because you did a google search, and a lot of anti-Trump stuff came up isn't proof of anything, other than proof that Trump has a lot of negative news surrounding him, and has for quite some time.
2) Have you tried to do the same search with other search engines?
If all of the major platforms - monopolies - for social media and general media reach are aggressively conspiring to limit speech based on politics, what you have is not anything resembling freedom. You have censorship in fact.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Google search = near universal platform control by one political ideology (which they've all admitted to over the years), which is now very openly censoring the right wing of politics. The coordinated censorship isn't subtle, they're almost flaunting it at this point.
It's an extremely dangerous concentration of power into one politically aligned monopoly set of corporations. We're seeing the results of that now, as the desire to directly control and influence politics kicks into gear.
If a platform has a very large monopoly position, then they should be legally forced open as a direct pass-through consequence of the first amendment. They should be required to allow all speech (that doesn't involve threats of violence, which isn't speech), or give up their monopoly position.