
‘We’re taking a look’ at whether Google searches should be regulated - _fizz_buzz_
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/28/trump-wakes-up-googles-himself-and-doesnt-like-what-he-sees-illegal/
======
lgleason
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size
they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws
under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to
post content etc.. Newspapers and television stations are held liable for
their content. Once they started to editorialize by banning things under
subjective pretexts such as "hate speech" they started to violate that. It is
also well known that there is political bias among these companies. This is
one of many strategies that can be used. But, more importantly, there is
concern from the left as well about these platforms and have been calls from
that side as well to regulate them. They would have been much better served to
have stayed neutral, but they've made their beds....

~~~
jchw
This is a weird argument to have. It raises many questions. Like, it's one
thing to suggest maybe libel laws should apply to big tech companies. But do
we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing
literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? For
example, can the president order that a given news source appear higher in the
rankings? Who decides what deserves to be ranked higher?

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?

~~~
adventured
Why would we look at the NY Times? They don't have a monopoly on national
news. They have a small minority position overall and always have.

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).

~~~
jchw
Now we're talking about an entirely different problem altogether. If you want
that problem fixed, we need better legislation for tech companies, not worse.
Adding more regulatory hurdles and legal obligations will just get you even
stronger incumbents.

------
gameswithgo
It is worth noting that often conservative and liberal Americans believe they
have a point of disagreement as to whether regulations on corporations are a
good or bad thing, in general. But really they do not disagree on this point.
Only the minor details of what those regulations should be exactly.

~~~
yathern
I don't agree with this statement. Yes, both conservatives and liberals
believe there is an amount of regulation that is acceptable. Conservatives
typically aren't anarchists. Liberals typically aren't full-socialists.

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.

~~~
creaghpatr
The current bipartisan issue is that the line is invisible and therefore
impossible to regulate. Of course, Google has a trade secrets case for the
line being invisible.

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?

~~~
gameswithgo
Why regulate search at all? A soon as you think Google is not giving you good
search results you can hop on over to Bing or a host of other options. The
free market works very well here. As opposed to the issue of net neutrality,
where very many Americans have no ISP they can switch to if they are not happy
with the throttling their ISP is doing. Said throttling could also be used to
silence or slow conservative news and ideas.

~~~
creaghpatr
Because the greater interests of Google's voting shareholders are not
necessarily aligned with the interests of America's voting electorate. Which
is really where any regulation of any company comes from, not an untypical
case, the government is just late to the party.

~~~
gameswithgo
There is no company where the greater interests of the shareholders is aligned
with the interests of the voting electorate.

------
MikeLui
I appreciate the relevance and importance of posting this to HN, but I also
think there’s not much anyone can add to the innate absurdity of the idea and
the president’s claims. Additionally, aren’t searches already somewhat
regulated e.g. DMCA takedown notices?

~~~
seren
I think the more generic questions is how are we going to assess that an
algorithm is fair or not.

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.

~~~
pitaj
My easy answer is "No. Don't regulate. Stop considering it. It's a terrible
idea. Please, no."

~~~
seren
If you look at the simple but extreme case below (someone named Null) :

[https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](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.

------
senthil_rajasek
I think it's appropriate to quote Vint Cerf here,

"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

[https://icannwiki.org/Vinton_Cerf](https://icannwiki.org/Vinton_Cerf)

~~~
quotemstr
Conversely, if you're unsatisfied with yourself, making your mirror distort
your reflection will only make things worse.

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.

~~~
senthil_rajasek
A distorting mirror is not what Vint is suggesting, the problem is not the
mirror it's the subject, fix the subject is what I take out of that quote.
Violence or force is not the only answer to fix society I have seen the light
of knowledge work miracles on certain societal problems.

~~~
quotemstr
Vint isn't suggesting that we do that, but a lot of other people are. Nothing
good can come of it; the article is part of the backlash against this impulse.
(And that should be disconcerting: backlashes have a way of being worse than
whatever it is they're fighting.)

------
acomjean
The internet exists, is way to big to manually curate, and google is just
providing a window into it with algorithmic searches.

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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Good luck with that.

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.

~~~
acomjean
That was a bit glib. I removed that line.

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.

------
atourgates
Trump is basing this off an article[1] that categorizes the best news outlets
in America and abroad (New York Times, the New Yorker, Bloomberg, LA Times,
NPR, the BBC, CNN) as being on the far left[2]. (There's also a few strange
inclusions like ESPN. I was unaware that ESPN was part of the liberal media
conspiracy).

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...](https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-pervasive-
anti-trump-anti-conservative-bias/)

[2] [https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-
content/51/files/20...](https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-
content/51/files/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2017-04-23-at-1.43.33-PM.png)

------
jiojfdsal3
To me, this is a strong sign of Google manipulating search results.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors](https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=american+mathematicians](https://www.google.com/search?q=american+mathematicians)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=american+scientists](https://www.google.com/search?q=american+scientists)

Image results:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=european+art+history&tbm=isc...](https://www.google.com/search?q=european+art+history&tbm=isch)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=white+couple&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=white+couple&tbm=isch)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=white+inventor&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=white+inventor&tbm=isch)

~~~
erulabs
Or it's extremely basic text matching and "African American Inventors" more
closely matches "American Inventors" (as it is an exact substring match) than
web pages about "Inventors from the United States", which is probably a more
common phrasing (see:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Inventors+from+the+United+St...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Inventors+from+the+United+States))

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.

~~~
jiojfdsal3
I added more search terms. Here are the results for "white inventor" on Google
Images for example.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=white+inventor&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=white+inventor&tbm=isch)

~~~
Dylan16807
How many photos of white inventors have the word "white" near them, though?
Image search isn't exactly parsing biographies. So it gets largely lost in
noise compared to "inventor".

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.

------
tj-teej
Why isn't the problem that Google has a monopoly on search?

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)

------
lifeisstillgood
They (FAANG) have moved from "interesting startups" to "essential utility".
The thing about essential utilities is they are _always_ regulated.

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.

~~~
iron0013
The very fact that so many people happily use DuckDuckGo instead of Google is
proof enough that Google isn't an essential utility. The same story is true
for all the rest: I'm sure you know people who have left Facebook completely
behind without any ill effects--in fact, everyone I know who has left FB has
heartily recommended it to anyone who will listen. No stretch of the
imagination is going to put these websites on the same footing as gas, water,
and electric.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
plenty of people have septic tanks and even generate their own electricity -
but that does not mean the 98% of users do not see the sewer company as
essential.

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.

~~~
antidesitter
> What google does is privatise a public good (our markup and usage of
> internet)

Please don’t throw around terms incorrectly. That’s not what “public good”
means:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good)

------
cphoover
I have no doubt in my mind, if the United States was a country without checks
and balances and the protection of the Constitution, we would be living under
authoritarian dictatorship right now. The quickness by the administration to
attack media, promote propaganda, and now censorship is frightening.

~~~
liftbigweights
> The quickness by the administration to attack media, promote propaganda, and
> now censorship is frightening.

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.

~~~
stanleydrew
Censorship isn't the best word for this, but he's certainly not promoting free
speech here. Promoting free speech would mean acknowledging that Google can do
whatever it wants, and say whatever it wants to say via its search results,
whether the government likes the results or not.

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.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> Promoting free speech would mean acknowledging that Google can do whatever
> it wants, and say whatever it wants to say via its search results, whether
> the government likes the results or not.

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?

~~~
stanleydrew
Whether Google is a monopoly in search or not is a determination the anti-
trust division of the justice department would have to make, which I don't
believe is what the current administration is actually suggesting they are
going to pursue since they are generally pretty unorganized and that sounds
like a lot of work.

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.

------
iron0013
It is frankly terrifying to me that so many voices in this thread are
defending this blatantly unconstitutional and thoroughly authoritarian idea.
If this ridiculous proposition is not beyond the pale, perhaps nothing is--a
chilling thought, imo.

------
dragonwriter
Remember when the Republicans were the ones complaining that net neutrality
was a backdoor route by Democrats to impose political content regulation on
internet channels?

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.

------
Spooky23
Wait, I thought that Kudlow was a free-marketeer who didn’t want the
government “picking winners”?

~~~
rpiguy
Wait, I thought the left hated giant corporations controlling their news?
Guess its cool if you agree with what is being censored...

------
hprotagonist
It's well past the point where journalists should, with most Trump tweet
articles, note the correspondence between "whatever fox and friends said
today" and "whatever he just tweeted".

[https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1034416321226784768?ref...](https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1034416321226784768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
"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."

------
yashap
Trump’s rhetoric around media is terrifying. The outlets best known for
thorough research and journalistic integrity he calls “fake news.” Meanwhile
he promotes outlets like Breitbart and Info Wars, which are essentially state
media, with zero journalistic integrity.

These are the actions we’re used to seeing from oppressive dictatorships, but
seeing them from the President of the United States is nuts.

------
cromwellian
If you search for “Hitler” you find mostly negative articles even though there
are some “news” sites affiliated with “very fine people” who write positive
stories.

The vast majority of major accredited news media is negative towards Trump,
ergo searches mostly reflect that. Shocking revelation.

------
econ4all
Before he was president or even running for office he'd call into a fox news
show and say something stupid and other news outlets would pick it up and I
remember being annoyed and thinking "why is this news?!" now he's president
and everything he says is news and it hurts my soul.

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.

~~~
sp332
We live in such a country _now_ but that could change at any time. If the
government starts dictating search results then we will not be a free country.
Unfortunately causality doesn't go the other way.

~~~
18pfsmt
As a republic, governed by the US Constitution, the 1st Amendment is clearly
written to prevent such stupidity. I can't believe this is even being
entertained on HN.

~~~
sp332
The first amendment is just a piece of paper unless someone enforces it. When
the head of the executive branch of government starts talking openly about
violating it, it's (past) time to take the threat seriously.

~~~
mikeash
Especially when the one body empowered to remove him sits idly by and does
nothing.

------
liftbigweights
Why single out google only? Isn't it an industry wide issue rather than a
company one?

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?

------
WallWextra
I hope he tries, because all the facile anti-tech rhetoric on the left will
probably go away if he does.

------
adventured
Gave this search a try - "Donald Trump" \- to see how bad it really is (I
rarely specifically google anything about Trump).

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.

~~~
18pfsmt
I find it rather depressing that _you_ would be espousing regulations that
hurt freedom (of Google, in this case). Please rethink your logic here.

~~~
adventured
I'm hyper socially liberal and when it comes to economics I very broadly
support free market policies.

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.

