I am not sure how regulation is really going to help anyone except the black hat SEOs. If anything it will just make things worse by slowing down the ability of

I am not sure how regulation is really going to help anyone except the black hat SEOs. If anything it will just make things worse by slowing down the ability of google to respond to black hat SEO and creating a more bureaucratic form of whose hand do I grease to get on the first page. I am not sure the author really grasps the scale that they are playing, or maybe he is sick of playing on that scale. The author states that the only the large players can afford to reverse engineer googles current ranking algorithm. However I don't see how forcing them to publish the exact algorithms would create any meaningful change for the "better". The big players will still game the system if anything they will be more successful as they will be able to move resources from reverse engineering to exploiting, and will have a larger time frame where an approach is viable due to red tape. The little guys will probably be just as bad off with roughly the same rule of thumbs they have today.