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‘We’re taking a look’ at whether Google searches should be regulated

86 points by _fizz_buzz_ 8y ago

cphoover 8y ago
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.
- growlist 8y ago
  Indeed, Google's administration scare me also.
- bhauer 8y ago
  Sure, but to be fair, if we didn't have good checks and balances, things would have been bad a very long time ago. This isn't the first time checks and balances can/will help us avoid bad policy, and it won't be the last.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  The frightening thing is that this would-be-king still has support from 40% of the populace. We're stuck with them and they are the greatest threat to the principles of American freedom. This country can't work with so many people happily supporting demagogues who pander to their pet issues and ignoring the damage they cause.
- pitaj 8y ago
  If only the constitution was a little better to start with. The interpretation of the commerce and general welfare clauses hurts my soul.
- FLUX-YOU 8y ago
  While this particular instance is dumb, there's definitely conversations in politics that need to happen about algorithmic biases. If this kicks things off, I'm fine with that. Trump doesn't address other search engines though, which (hilariously) helps Google more than the threat of looming regulations hurts them. Getting attacked by Trump is a badge of honor at this point. Just about any liberal or conservative with a brain will realize only regulating Google's results is a very bad move when there is Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  > 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.
  - cphoover 8y ago
    > "How exactly is trump promoting censorship here? Isn't he doing the exact opposite? Isn't he promoting free speech?" We are talking about a president who routinely threatens punitive government actions against detractors. There exists a line between criticizing bad journalism, and using executive powers to threaten critics. The later is what dictators do. In the case of Google, they maintain their search algorithm is not politically biased. Unless we have substantive evidence proving otherwise I see no reason not to believe them. It seems what Trump is suggesting here, is a government regime controlling what search results we see... That is a very scary prospect, right now. I have a brother working as a journalist, who toils away fact checking, all day long. I can assure you he and his colleagues do way more due-diligence, fact-checking, and gathering of supporting evidence, than the Office of the Press Secretary could even try to pretend to. It's so easy to get up in a press-conference say something patently false, when you don't allow any dissent. If you don't like criticism it's "Fake News". If you can't see what Trump is doing when he calls the media "Anti-American", you have the wool over your eyes. It's dictator 101.
  - stanleydrew 8y ago
    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.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  While I am not sure how plausible it is that US gets there, it certainly feels like some sort of authoritarian dictatorship is still possible. Democracy is only as good as our institutions, and a lot of institutions seem to be struggling. Checks and balances require the separate branches to be willing to apply them. With the apparent lack of any meaningful oversight by the legislature, it does not seem like the checks and balances are working very effectively. I suppose that's a strong reason why many (including myself) prefer divided governments, so that adversaries can keep each other from going too far. I don't remember where I read it, but something like this rings true: the founders anticipated authoritarians seeking power, but they did not anticipate legislators allowing it. Edit: I don't mean to say that Trump becoming a dictator in the US is possible; I think that's extremely unlikely. I simply mean that there is a weakness in the US political system when government is controlled entirely by one party, and that this weakness could possibly be exploited some day.
senthil_rajasek 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.)
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  That was the relatively decentralized and competitive pre-social media internet. The problem now is that google and facebook have such a dominant position that larry page and zuckerburg can decide what to show us and what not to show us. They essentially hold the mirror and they decide what we get to see. Vint Cerf's internet is the one I grew up with and the one I believe in. With the rise of social media and monopolistic tech companies, the relatively uncensored decentralized internet has turned into a dystopian curated and centralized one.
gameswithgo 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yathern 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
      - 8y ago
MikeLui 8y ago
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?
- ikeboy 8y ago
  So it's absurd to suspect Google of doing something Facebook has already admitted to?
- sp332 8y ago
  The claims are justification for the regulations they want to push through. Some countries have laws about what search results can and can't be returned. It's quite doable, and if you don't want it to happen, you probably shouldn't get complacent. Go talk to your representatives and consider getting active in an election campaign.
- seren 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    My easy answer is "No. Don't regulate. Stop considering it. It's a terrible idea. Please, no."
    - seren 8y ago
      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.
jiojfdsal3 8y ago
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=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=european+art+history&tbm=isc... 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 8y ago
  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+States https://www.google.com/search?q=Inventors+from+the+United+St...) 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.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    I think OPs point is somewhat corroborated by the choices of Google Doodle, both in who they select and who they omit.
    - quotemstr 8y ago
      In a sense, it doesn't matter whether the curious "american inventors" search results set comes out of political bias or technical inadequacy: from the perspective of many people, Google's editorial choices in certain areas have forfeited the benefit of the doubt in others. This situation is a good example of why it's important to pay attention to maintaining the appearance of impartiality as well as actually being impartial. (Disclaimer: I work for Google. Nothing related to search.)
acomjean 8y ago
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.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The solution is to mandate that Google publicly disclose their algorithms and the various weightings they apply to incentivize behavior and how much of an impact they have. Then everyone can see whether or not their behavior constitutes unfair bias, can test for themselves what's going on. Google does not need or deserve the ability to keep the way all human knowledge is accessed and found today a trade secret. Additional notes on this to address the obvious criticisms: - Google would still have the benefit of it's actual data/crawled content that presumably would not be disclosed and constitutes a significant portion of their business advantages. - It's unlikely competing search engines would somehow leapfrog Google's technology by having access to their search ranking algorithms. At best copying Google would make them "as good as Google", but you need to be "better than" to get people to switch or offer features and benefits they don't. - Even if all of Google's data and algorithms were cloned by competitors, everyone would still by and large use Google because Google is the default on almost every platform and browser, and Google has a significant lock-in effect over their platforms. Which is to say, requiring one of the world's most powerful monopolies to disclose the algorithms by which knowledge is found would have minimal to non-existent impact on their business but have significant benefit to society.
  - sct202 8y ago
    Good luck with that and prepare for their search results to be overrun by content farms and stores SEOing their websites to the spec.
econ4all 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        Especially when the one body empowered to remove him sits idly by and does nothing.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      The constitutions of the USSR and Nazi Germany had similar provisions. The constitution of China still does. These things aren’t magic, and authoritarians find ways around them.
enraged_camel 8y ago
President Smoothbrains thinks he should regulate Google searches. What is this, China? He can't get his Mexico wall built, so now he will try a "Great Firewall"?
- aokiji 8y ago
  It is exactly the other way around. The tech giants are in bed with China and subverting the United States.
lgleason 8y ago
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....
- schizoidboy 8y ago
  It's also possible that they consciously decided to stop being neutral (e.g. Zuckerberg's statement in Congress about being like a publisher) which would ultimately lead to regulation and thus reduce competition against them and "outsource" all the drama against them over to Congress.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > which would ultimately lead to regulation Why would acting as a publisher lead to government content regulations? Do we not have freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution?
    - schizoidboy 8y ago
      I don't remember the details but I remember some people were surprised by some of Zuckerberg's comments and thought it could open them up to regulation. Maybe it wasn't the comment about publishing.
- jklinger410 8y ago
  As soon as they implemented algorithmic feeds they forfeited their neutrality as a service.
- 8y ago
yashap 8y ago
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.
WallWextra 8y ago
I hope he tries, because all the facile anti-tech rhetoric on the left will probably go away if he does.
adventured 8y ago
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.
- cphoover 8y ago
  Where is the non-anecdotal proof? Do you have any substantiated accounts from whistle-blowers? leaked documents? Just because you did a google search, and a lot of anti-Trump stuff came up isn't proof of anything, other than proof that Trump has a lot of negative news surrounding him, and has for quite some time.
- aroberge 8y ago
  1) How many popular sites point back at Breitbart? At least initially, Google's search algorithm appeared to be based on the number of such backlinks. I imagine it still does to a certain extent. I doubt very much that the net traffic to a given site plays an important role in Google's search algorithm. 2) Have you tried to do the same search with other search engines?
- realusername 8y ago
  There's no censorship on Trump, he just has a very bad reputation and PR, there's no conspiracy, if you are not convinced, just take a look at his Twitter account and you will understand why almost all the coverage is negative. And Breibart is a very niche far-right newspaper at best.
Spooky23 8y ago
Wait, I thought that Kudlow was a free-marketeer who didn’t want the government “picking winners”?
- rpiguy 8y ago
  Wait, I thought the left hated giant corporations controlling their news? Guess its cool if you agree with what is being censored...
atourgates 8y ago
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-pervasive-anti-trump-anti-conservative-bias/ https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv... [2] https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2017-04-23-at-1.43.33-PM.png https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/20...
liftbigweights 8y ago
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?
hprotagonist 8y ago
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_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1034416321226784768?ref... "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."
iron0013 8y ago
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.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
cromwellian 8y ago
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.
tj-teej 8y ago
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)
dragonwriter 8y ago
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.

86 points by _fizz_buzz_ 8y ago

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.

growlist 8y ago
Indeed, Google's administration scare me also.
bhauer 8y ago
Sure, but to be fair, if we didn't have good checks and balances, things would have been bad a very long time ago. This isn't the first time checks and balances can/will help us avoid bad policy, and it won't be the last.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
The frightening thing is that this would-be-king still has support from 40% of the populace. We're stuck with them and they are the greatest threat to the principles of American freedom. This country can't work with so many people happily supporting demagogues who pander to their pet issues and ignoring the damage they cause.
pitaj 8y ago
If only the constitution was a little better to start with. The interpretation of the commerce and general welfare clauses hurts my soul.
FLUX-YOU 8y ago
While this particular instance is dumb, there's definitely conversations in politics that need to happen about algorithmic biases. If this kicks things off, I'm fine with that. Trump doesn't address other search engines though, which (hilariously) helps Google more than the threat of looming regulations hurts them. Getting attacked by Trump is a badge of honor at this point. Just about any liberal or conservative with a brain will realize only regulating Google's results is a very bad move when there is Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.
liftbigweights 8y ago
> 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.
- cphoover 8y ago
  > "How exactly is trump promoting censorship here? Isn't he doing the exact opposite? Isn't he promoting free speech?" We are talking about a president who routinely threatens punitive government actions against detractors. There exists a line between criticizing bad journalism, and using executive powers to threaten critics. The later is what dictators do. In the case of Google, they maintain their search algorithm is not politically biased. Unless we have substantive evidence proving otherwise I see no reason not to believe them. It seems what Trump is suggesting here, is a government regime controlling what search results we see... That is a very scary prospect, right now. I have a brother working as a journalist, who toils away fact checking, all day long. I can assure you he and his colleagues do way more due-diligence, fact-checking, and gathering of supporting evidence, than the Office of the Press Secretary could even try to pretend to. It's so easy to get up in a press-conference say something patently false, when you don't allow any dissent. If you don't like criticism it's "Fake News". If you can't see what Trump is doing when he calls the media "Anti-American", you have the wool over your eyes. It's dictator 101.
- stanleydrew 8y ago
  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.
checkyoursudo 8y ago
While I am not sure how plausible it is that US gets there, it certainly feels like some sort of authoritarian dictatorship is still possible. Democracy is only as good as our institutions, and a lot of institutions seem to be struggling. Checks and balances require the separate branches to be willing to apply them. With the apparent lack of any meaningful oversight by the legislature, it does not seem like the checks and balances are working very effectively. I suppose that's a strong reason why many (including myself) prefer divided governments, so that adversaries can keep each other from going too far. I don't remember where I read it, but something like this rings true: the founders anticipated authoritarians seeking power, but they did not anticipate legislators allowing it. Edit: I don't mean to say that Trump becoming a dictator in the US is possible; I think that's extremely unlikely. I simply mean that there is a weakness in the US political system when government is controlled entirely by one party, and that this weakness could possibly be exploited some day.

senthil_rajasek 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.)
liftbigweights 8y ago
That was the relatively decentralized and competitive pre-social media internet. The problem now is that google and facebook have such a dominant position that larry page and zuckerburg can decide what to show us and what not to show us. They essentially hold the mirror and they decide what we get to see. Vint Cerf's internet is the one I grew up with and the one I believe in. With the rise of social media and monopolistic tech companies, the relatively uncensored decentralized internet has turned into a dystopian curated and centralized one.

gameswithgo 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago
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yathern 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - 8y ago

MikeLui 8y ago

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?

ikeboy 8y ago
So it's absurd to suspect Google of doing something Facebook has already admitted to?
sp332 8y ago
The claims are justification for the regulations they want to push through. Some countries have laws about what search results can and can't be returned. It's quite doable, and if you don't want it to happen, you probably shouldn't get complacent. Go talk to your representatives and consider getting active in an election campaign.
seren 8y ago
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 8y ago
  My easy answer is "No. Don't regulate. Stop considering it. It's a terrible idea. Please, no."
  - seren 8y ago
    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.

jiojfdsal3 8y ago

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=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=european+art+history&tbm=isc... 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 8y ago
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+States https://www.google.com/search?q=Inventors+from+the+United+St...) 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.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  I think OPs point is somewhat corroborated by the choices of Google Doodle, both in who they select and who they omit.
  - quotemstr 8y ago
    In a sense, it doesn't matter whether the curious "american inventors" search results set comes out of political bias or technical inadequacy: from the perspective of many people, Google's editorial choices in certain areas have forfeited the benefit of the doubt in others. This situation is a good example of why it's important to pay attention to maintaining the appearance of impartiality as well as actually being impartial. (Disclaimer: I work for Google. Nothing related to search.)

acomjean 8y ago

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.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
The solution is to mandate that Google publicly disclose their algorithms and the various weightings they apply to incentivize behavior and how much of an impact they have. Then everyone can see whether or not their behavior constitutes unfair bias, can test for themselves what's going on. Google does not need or deserve the ability to keep the way all human knowledge is accessed and found today a trade secret. Additional notes on this to address the obvious criticisms: - Google would still have the benefit of it's actual data/crawled content that presumably would not be disclosed and constitutes a significant portion of their business advantages. - It's unlikely competing search engines would somehow leapfrog Google's technology by having access to their search ranking algorithms. At best copying Google would make them "as good as Google", but you need to be "better than" to get people to switch or offer features and benefits they don't. - Even if all of Google's data and algorithms were cloned by competitors, everyone would still by and large use Google because Google is the default on almost every platform and browser, and Google has a significant lock-in effect over their platforms. Which is to say, requiring one of the world's most powerful monopolies to disclose the algorithms by which knowledge is found would have minimal to non-existent impact on their business but have significant benefit to society.
- sct202 8y ago
  Good luck with that and prepare for their search results to be overrun by content farms and stores SEOing their websites to the spec.

econ4all 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Especially when the one body empowered to remove him sits idly by and does nothing.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    The constitutions of the USSR and Nazi Germany had similar provisions. The constitution of China still does. These things aren’t magic, and authoritarians find ways around them.

enraged_camel 8y ago

President Smoothbrains thinks he should regulate Google searches. What is this, China? He can't get his Mexico wall built, so now he will try a "Great Firewall"?

aokiji 8y ago
It is exactly the other way around. The tech giants are in bed with China and subverting the United States.

lgleason 8y ago

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....

schizoidboy 8y ago
It's also possible that they consciously decided to stop being neutral (e.g. Zuckerberg's statement in Congress about being like a publisher) which would ultimately lead to regulation and thus reduce competition against them and "outsource" all the drama against them over to Congress.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > which would ultimately lead to regulation Why would acting as a publisher lead to government content regulations? Do we not have freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution?
  - schizoidboy 8y ago
    I don't remember the details but I remember some people were surprised by some of Zuckerberg's comments and thought it could open them up to regulation. Maybe it wasn't the comment about publishing.
jklinger410 8y ago
As soon as they implemented algorithmic feeds they forfeited their neutrality as a service.
8y ago

yashap 8y ago

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.

WallWextra 8y ago

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

adventured 8y ago

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.

cphoover 8y ago
Where is the non-anecdotal proof? Do you have any substantiated accounts from whistle-blowers? leaked documents? Just because you did a google search, and a lot of anti-Trump stuff came up isn't proof of anything, other than proof that Trump has a lot of negative news surrounding him, and has for quite some time.
aroberge 8y ago
1) How many popular sites point back at Breitbart? At least initially, Google's search algorithm appeared to be based on the number of such backlinks. I imagine it still does to a certain extent. I doubt very much that the net traffic to a given site plays an important role in Google's search algorithm. 2) Have you tried to do the same search with other search engines?
realusername 8y ago
There's no censorship on Trump, he just has a very bad reputation and PR, there's no conspiracy, if you are not convinced, just take a look at his Twitter account and you will understand why almost all the coverage is negative. And Breibart is a very niche far-right newspaper at best.

Spooky23 8y ago

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

rpiguy 8y ago
Wait, I thought the left hated giant corporations controlling their news? Guess its cool if you agree with what is being censored...

atourgates 8y ago

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-pervasive-anti-trump-anti-conservative-bias/ https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv... [2] https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2017-04-23-at-1.43.33-PM.png https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/20...

liftbigweights 8y ago

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?

hprotagonist 8y ago

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_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1034416321226784768?ref... "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."

iron0013 8y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

cromwellian 8y ago

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.

tj-teej 8y ago

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)

dragonwriter 8y ago

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.