[gnaritas]

You talk about Google as if it's some community resource you have a right to have; it's not. Google only has the power to destroy your business if you make your business model reliant upon them, that is a choice you make. There's nothing wrong with that choice, but you have to recognize it's your choice and Google owes you nothing at all.

[asnyder]

As soon as you start having such a huge market share like Google does, whether you have a right to it is irrelevant. The fact is that they dominate, and have a defacto Monopoly in certain segments of our population. As such, there needs to be some standards and processes to for conflict resolution.

We shouldn't be ok with a company controlling almost all of search and not having any way to check them. There's a reason certain industries are now regulated, and why there are anti-competitive laws. Google and the web in general is still too new to have such regulation, but hopefully we're not too far away from it.

Again, I'd feel much better at night knowing there's a standard procedure with actual follow-up to explain and investigate search related issues, including delistings.

[gnaritas]

> The fact is that they dominate, and have a defacto Monopoly in certain segments of our population.

No, it's not a fact at all. Use Yahoo or Bing, as long as there are functional alternatives you can't claim there's a monopoly. Google dominates search, that's not the same thing as a monopoly. Google does not have a monopoly.

> As such, there needs to be some standards and processes to for conflict resolution.

No, there doesn't, you haven't established that they are a monopoly, or that they're promoting anti-competitive practices, or that search is even a vital service like electricity that should be regulated.

> There's a reason certain industries are now regulated, and why there are anti-competitive laws.

Yes, there are, for good reasons, no such reason exists to regulate search.

> Google and the web in general is still too new to have such regulation, but hopefully we're not too far away from it.

Hopefully we're very far away from it because it's absolutely not necessary and shouldn't happen.

> Again, I'd feel much better at night knowing there's a standard procedure with actual follow-up to explain and investigate search related issues, including delistings.

Then don't use Google, no one is forcing you to, you can get traffic from other places if you put effort into it. The fact is, you use Google because their product is superior and they bring you more traffic; that doesn't mean other options aren't available, just that they don't work as well as Google does. And for having a superior product, you want to punish them with regulation. That's seriously fucked up thinking.