Absurd Intellectual

Search engine giant Google loves net neutrality. If you don’t know, that’s the concept that when you sign up for internet service, you’ll get access to any website or web service you want, equally. This is like the telephone — if you call, it rings.

Some companies don’t like net neutrality. If you sign up for their internet service, they want to be able to deliver their own streaming video faster than their competitors — or, give you faster video service, while slowing down your email, say.

People fear, though, that it could lead to a situation where AbsurdIntellectual.com (say) could pay to have its website delivered extra fast — at the expense of competitor IntellectuallyAbsurd.com, whose poor users would be left watching the “loading” bar.

Google, as a company that benefits from people being able to access it from anywhere, at any time, with reasonably quick speed, obviously would like net neutrality to be enforced. And, the FCC is looking at the concept.

But is Google really in favour of a full and neutral internet? It’s a search engine, right? So it ranks and lists websites in a specific, ordered fashion, right? It’s that obviously a business model that’s specifically tied to promoting some websites at the expense of others?

That’s the argument persuasively made in this opinion column:

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.

The author, who claims to have suffered at the hands 0f unpreferential treatment by Google, suggests that net neutrality be expanded to include “search neutrality.”

I’m sympathetic, but his argument lacks a compelling definition of such neutrality. Like it or not, when I’m searching for something specific, that’s what I want. Google’s whole raison-d’etre is to provide me with the one thing that I want at that time.

And I worry that an ever-reaching desire for fairness in everything will require things like “news neutrality.” And who’ll enforce that?