Search Neutrality: On Going Battle for Net Neutrality
Here is some good GigaOM coverage on the on-going Net Neutrality debate. Looks like carriers are definitely setting their sights on Google and bring out the big guns (and funds). The weirdest arguement is shown below.
From there you get the new argument: If Google wants network neutrality, why aren’t they offering search neutrality?
Telco water-carrier Mike Volpi, the general manager of Cisco’s service provider business, dedicated a long portion of his speech at the company’s December analyst conference to this point, even putting up slides with Google search pages showing that Google charges more for preferential ad treatment. You might ask, what does that have to do with packet-sniffing and router-based control of your Internet consumption? Nothing, but nobody’s asking those questions.
Paul (of GigaOM) is right on the money. What does advertisement placing have to do with search neutrality. As a matter of fact, Google does give search neutrality. This the reason for Google’s entire success in the first place (and trumped Yahoo and Altavista). It basically does not tamper with it’s search algorithm when returning the results. I believe this should be neutral enough. If they are talking about Search Advertisement Neutrality then that is another story all together. Carriers and network operators like any other business establishments get to choose which advertisements get displayed on their advertising spots. Should Google be subject to different rules just because they make more money? It is like saying the advertisements on Verizon’s front page should be subject to neutrality laws. Their advertising space is usable as they see fit. In the end the only statement from the carriers that definitely ring true is “Google has more market cap than we do“.
