| > Regulation doesn't require proof of illegal behavior. Sanctions under competition law do require proof of abuse of market power. ISP-like regulation, which is a different beast, is usually being justified by the fact that ISPs are natural monopolies. [1] > In my opinion we also shouldn't allow private citizens to control the internet. What makes a search engine useful? The relevance of results. In my opinion, private companies (Google in particular) do a fairly good job at providing relevant results. I prefer that over a government-approved "neutral" algorithm, whatever that would even mean. If you feel that Google's results aren't relevant, give a competitor a try. Nothing stops you. Do you run a web site that was blocked by Google without justification? Go ahead, complain. The mere possibility of abuse doesn't justify tight regulation. > We don't allow private citizens to make weapons of mass destruction because the potential for harm is too great. Yeah, should Google ever choose to sell WMD to my neighbor, switching to Bing wouldn't really help me. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400975 |
And I'm not promoting sanctions. The only thing I've proposed is some kind of transparency, like 3rd party auditing.
>If you feel that Google's results aren't relevant, give a competitor a try. Nothing stops you.
That won't do a thing to mitigate the harm I'm talking about. If 1 company controls every news organization in the country except for a few college newspapers, would you tell me that me personally reading the college newspaper would help the situation?
>The mere possibility of abuse doesn't justify tight regulation.
Publicly traded companies and financial institutions deal with plenty of tight regulation because of the possibility of abuse. We already force publicly traded companies to require independent financial auditing, why not require the gateway to the internet to undergo independent search auditing.