I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf...

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm?fusea...

Asking Google to be responsive to any website demanding special treatment for higher search rankings is unreasonable. Best practices are published and tools are available. It's hard to see monopolistic abuse there.

The only difference is that Gmail (and other Google products) are listed when you, shockingly, go to google.com. Are you saying Google can't mention Google products on google.com? Do you think gmail is somehow not as popular as it is and wouldn't rate the #1 spot for searches for email?

I like to think we are indeed slowly progressing, but at the same time it's clear that companies in power are "progressing" too. I'm unsure if humanitarian goals like this are possible if we regard them as "sooner or later it'll happen".

Interesting thought nonetheless.

are we going to use the IE solution, but instead now force it on providers whom you have to voluntarily choose over another to provide selected results? who gets to choose who appears?

Well, if that failure to rank highly is due to Google manually removing you, I think it's fairly clear whose fault it is.

(It's Google's.)

Edit: To everyone downvoting, can you explain why you expect to be provided guaranteed service from a business that you have no business relationship with?

It should be, though.

It's not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it's a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.

The law shouldn't be written like we live in the stone age.

Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.

It's one thing to talk about anti-trust. It's a completely different thing when you're on the same team as the government that would be bringing the case against you.

If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. Do things that are actual anti-trust prevention. Saying that the solution is to regulate all these little edge cases is ineffective and inefficient, because you need a different regulation for each concern that are all rooted in the same sentiment: Google is too big.

This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs.

You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.

In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all?

Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.

Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.

How? Because this...

> Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.

...doesn't achieve that end.

Google could have a thousand competitors and 99% of the marketshare, because just because a competitor exists doesn't compel, or even slightly persuade, anyone to use it.

I'm all for antitrust laws. I just don't see how the usual remedies would work here.

There are also plenty of cases where regulations have greatly improved outcomes by curbing capitalistic eventualities.

I'm personally conflicted about this particular case, and have no idea which will result in a "better" outcome when choosing between non-regulastion and regulation.

However, I strongly believe that limiting Google's overall power is a better solution than regulating particular ways that Google could abuse their power, as I think the former is a better route if regulation is the route you choose.

I dont think Google is quite there yet to be regulated. You have alternative like bing, and you have Duck Duck Go, and the latter actually provide pretty decent results.

Which, however, has nothing to do with the article's point -- disappearance of a single entry with competitive advantage over Google. No statistical significance for search, but instead wielding its enormous power to squelch a small competitor. IMO, if true, this is the case for the government to address via rulemaking, courts or some other means.

An advertiser might care if there were another, more impartial search engine that was drawing those eyeballs away, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given the current ubiquity of Google as a household name and company.

Sure, DuckDuckGo or whatever might draw some of the more tech-literate or paranoid crowd if Google started aggressively filtering results (which, for the record, I don't think they are doing or are likely to do), but why would advertisers care? Those people represent a tiny fraction of their eyeballs, perhaps so small as to be lost in statistical noise. Besides, many/most of the tech-literate folks use adblockers anyway, and the paranoids probably don't want to transmit their personal information online to buy things.

Agreed completely. But users will (eventually) run away if they do not perceive the search as efficient. There are now options in search. People use google exactly because they consider results good enough. If googling "photos from X" starts returning most pictures from Google-associated resorts and this gets coverage from first tier news agencies Google will see non-negligible defections.

I also do not think Google is likely to do aggressive search filtering, not because this is "not right" but for pure self preservation -- aggressive filtering would be cutting the branch they sit on.

> ...advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial.

I do not believe that is factually accurate. I think advertisers don't have a compelling reason to care whether or not searches are impartial for the reasons I expressed.

Enforce antitrust laws.

Sigh - anybody remember when this was pretty much a given?

Forced (inter-)nationalization of Google under the control of the UN.

>Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge?

Pretty much yes. Charges should be bared by the Global Federation of Essential Services.

Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?

If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN? Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?

If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?

What happens to my existing Google Account? Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset? Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?

I'm very honestly curious how you would orchestrate this, or expect it to work.

Mostly search. We'll drop the ads. People will be subsidising search already, so no need for ads.

>If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN?

No, that Alphabet can keep.

>Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?

Yes.

>If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?

Every piece of data will be queryable by a simple RESTful API for everybody, including everybody's else search history. We'll call it "radical transparency". This is include the data of government members.

>What happens to my existing Google Account?

It remains as is, only better.

>Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset?

Yes, all, see above.

>Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?

We kill that. It never worked well anyway.

I'm partly joking, and partly imagining what a sane humanity, that could build and coordinate stuff on a global scale without letting them to the markets, in other words a "Star Trek" like government, would do.

Will UNGoogle have the "one box" answers (eg, music lyrics, weather) which give real information from the search results, or just ten blue links?

Will the employment contracts of existing staff (SWEs, SREs, PMs, lawyercats) be transferred to the UN as well? Will employment be maintained on the current terms?

Will the UN employ more "customer service representatives"? What would staffing levels look like, across the UNGoogle?

Will UNGoogle maintain the existing data relationships as Google? Will UNGoogle purchase eg, Geo data from third-parties, or will it just be their privilege to submit their data to UNGoogle?

What will the process look like at UNGoogle for making changes to the ranking algorithms? Will there be an appeals process if a ranking change is detrimental to your business or national interests?

I guess someone's been reading Picketty ..

And even more important than 30% perhaps, culturally, business-wise, etc.

If you can make an argument to the contrary that doesn't revolve around "it's not 1776!" I'd love to hear it, but I seriously doubt that it would be in line with any US law. I don't think there's anything "stone age" about not requiring private companies to do things to help other private companies without compensation.

The post you're replying to is suggesting that removal from Google results _should_ be part of US law. Perhaps the impact of Google is such that there should be legislation regulating Google's behaviour.

In the UK we have a public phone book maintained by British Telecom. I can opt out of the phone book but BT cannot choose not to include me if I've opted IN. BT is a private company but this one aspect of their output is regulated by law.

The difference between a private company selling a service and something considered an essential utility is legislation, presumably?

As if this excuses any kind of behavior.

Specifically, in this case there are in many countries antitrust laws, which target public and private companies alike.

If our system worked, Google would almost certainly broken up and most of their databases (full of people's private information) couldn't exist legally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_business_practices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_...

Their results can influence a great number of people, it can make or break a business, and it can (probably) cause or at least greatly contribute to a revolution in some countries.

You know, hence why countries like China want to control such power.

Google indexing fairly is every bit as essential to the maintaining equal opportunity for websites and businesses on the internet as net neutrality is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

The problem is that when a search engine has the overwhelming majority of the online search market, freedom of information has a strict dependence on the QoS of that engine.

Since people (at least in Europe) have a legal right to freedom of information, if Google is not providing support in this regard, then it's responsible for not respecting rights of European citizens.

edit:

Freedom of information is part of the Swiss constitution too.

> Every person has the right to receive information freely, to obtain it from generally accessible sources and to disseminate it [16.3]

[x] - which is an absurdity in itself - what information? how? when? where? This "right" is just another overreach by the EU et. al. wanting everything to be a "human right" even if it's nonsense. A right to whose information? If I have a unilateral right to information, does that mean I have a right to your medical records? Where do you draw the line? If it's just a right to my own information, which I think is reasonable, Google search results don't qualify.

> does that mean I have a right to your medical records

No, because under data-protection legislation nobody has the right to data about you, but you. More European insanity.

I think GP has incorrectly categorised this as an FOI issue, it's more to do with Antitrust, which is a well worn path in the USA as well.

That's why I believe a decrease in the investment in "traffic acquisition costs" may be in the best interest of Google itself.

Everyone is responsible for the consequences of his own actions. What did we expect?

It would certainly be an improvement and it would give more leverage in avoiding regulatory impositions that in the long term are certainly deleterious (for all).

Perhaps I'm naïve, but I see two possibilities: the acceptance of the overreach in regulations/fines/.., or a self-limitation of the monopoly.

But I'm certainly not in the position to answer the question.

It's not really a big deal that different sets of laws conflict with one another. It's fairly common in fact. For instance Freedom of Speech vs Defamation laws.

Good legislation like good code, accounts for these corner cases. Where it doesn't you have the lawyers and the courts to work it out.

Yes you have. If Google is not representing competitors fairly in search results, that's abuse of dominant position.

If Google has a monopoly on search then break up their monopoly on search in your country.

BUT.

Saying that Google needs to bend over backwards to accommodate every possible edge case of EU human rights (of which there are far too many that are overly broad) as a response to anti-trust concerns is absurd.

In the end, you're just going to end up solidifying Google's monopoly, because Google actually does have the funds to build out such platforms, even if they don't want to. Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources to do the same. If then you governments say "well actually only Google needs to do this", you've found yourself in a position where governments are playing favorites, and that is never a good thing.

If anything, I'd propose the counter-argument that startups can more nimbly respond to these edge-cases, whereas the cost of change for a large hulking conglomerate is where the problems lie.

Until Alphabet buys out that startup for a couple of millions. Imho that's a factor barely mentioned on the issue of "Google monopoly". If anything pops up that looks like it could disrupt the Google dominance, long or short-term, it's quickly acquired and welcomed to the flock.

On one hand that's good because puts the immense resources of Alphabet behind interesting and sometimes important ideas, on the other hand, it leads to a situation where meaningful competition can't grow to a size where it could actually oppose Google's dominance, at least not independently.

Attack anti-trust at it's source. If you find this story worrying, your worry should not be "Google is removing search results", but rather "Google has so much dominance, them removing results is a serious concern".

This addresses your first point: don't force Google to do certain things and then let them buy any and all competitors, instead don't let them buyout all competitors in the first place. It's a much more elegant solution, in my opinion.

this is quite baffling. tech companies are making money hand over fist, they have massive margins, a company like google can afford real support and if they dont think so they should pay in court

Hardly the most appropriate source for learning whether the option worked well for the other end.

Or, Google can get around that by repeatedly tweaking the algorithm on purpose to demote specific types of sites. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/. (long read, but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines)

There's also the issue of false positives. Machine learning algorithms that demote sites (panda/penguin/vince) certainly have some amount of unintended victims.

most comparsion shopping sites were anoying and did get ranked for everything I wanted to buy. I.e. "buy television" gave you 1. amazon, 2-6. comparsion sites.

If I wanted to compare televisions I would've entered "compare televisions pricing", etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1406441&st...

What about Dave Rubin? Does he fall into the same category as nazi propaganda according to you? What about Christina Hoff Sommers? Same question. And the list goes on an on. I do not necessarily agree with these viewpoint but I strongly against censoring them just because it does not fall inline with Google's political agenda.

You are aware that Youtube faced a huge backlash earlier this year from large scale advertisers over "hate videos" and "extremist content": https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/google-youtube-a...

Defining what a "hate video" and is "extremist" can be vague, so it's not surprising that some strong political channels are caught in the crosswinds, even if they are not necessarily "hate speech" or "extreme". (After all, Youtube is probably relying heavily on user feedback to determine what to flag). It's also not surprising that other things are caught in the crosswind (as the Ars Technica article mentions, LGBT content was also caught in the crosswinds.)

Youtube's most recent advertiser-drive purgek came over "inappropriate" videos aimed at children. Again, advertisers are driving what some might call "censorship". https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-deletes-150000-videos-foll...

Basically, I feel like strong advertiser presence in the future is going to heavily focus Youtube towards more "mainstream" oriented material in the future, especially on what can be monetized.

Is it censorship? Not really -- no one is going to force companies to spend money to advertise where they don't want to. Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure.

At this point, in my opinion, the energy some are spending in fighting Youtube's monetization policy ("1st Amendment" lawsuits against Youtube are going to fail, in my opinion) would be better spent in making sure the web remains open. So that any Youtube competitors, some of which might focus on hosting "non-mainstream" content that Youtube might ignore in the future, actually have a chance.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facebook-halts-potenti...

This was in production for god knows how long.

"Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure."

Well I do not use Youtube as much as I can. I use alternative video content providers. Anyways, this argument is silly at the very least.

Let's throw a counter example on another platform. Most American talk radio is conservative. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2015/07/13/why-all-t...) IMHO the reasons for this are largely demographic oriented as specified in the Forbes article -- consequently, liberal specific talk radio has not done as well as a business model since, say, the 1980s. Conservative specific talk radio has.

It's pretty easy to Google grumbling from liberals about Clear Channel being conservative and crowding out liberal talk and whatnot. These arguments seem as silly to me as the arguments about the political stance of Google (which I also think is more driven by business dollars and cents, not explicit political lean).

At any rate, what's the solution here? Force Clear Channel to host liberal political talk via government decree? That would be about as awful as forcing Youtube to monetize conservative videos via government decree.

The only arguments that make sense in this direction to me is that American radio, in effect, is a monopoly. It might be difficult to start a "liberal specific talk radio" format even if there was a solid business case for it, because the airwaves are dominated by only a few corporations. (I would argue that this actually played itself out more in the world of music -- a lot of music never crossed into the playlists of corporate radio or MTV, because of various reasons. Which is why Napster was so heavily embraced by many once it showed up.)

Likewise with Google / Youtube: I would be much more receptive to arguments along these lines. If they became a defacto monopoly (I don't think they are there yet, but this is a danger these days), only one "content policy" would exist. And that definitely would be a problem.

Hence why I think the real issue here is keeping the web open and competitive.

[0] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/censorship-is...

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15045653

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0c1Bph1jrQ

After all, it goes from the top "We're not arguing for censorship, we're arguing just take it off the page. Put it somewhere else. Make it harder to find." - Eric Schmidt

For any given search many websites have an economic incentive to be at the top and are willing to understand the process and jump though some hoops. However, jumping though hoops has zero correlation with quality and only minimal correlation with relevancy.

It's not an easy job to find a useful mattress review website or whatever, but Google's users don't care about easy they care about how useful something is. Even worse Google's actions end up changing the websites they are linking to. It's a slow but vicious cycle that I don't have a solution to, I just finally realized what the problem was.

This is something notorious and traversal to all its products.

This is Business 101 everywhere except Silicon Valley, which thinks it knows better than everyone else in the world.

What you mean is that low level employees can only manually remove sites following a set of strict guidelines.

Senior management can make whatever editorial decisions they like.

... as well as loud and obnoxious know-it-alls that tag team, upvote their own answers and drown any discussion in irrelevant bickering and deferrals to their own wisdom.