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> | THESE ARE MY COMMENTS TO PROFESSOR MOGLEN'S COMMENTS. A REVISED ESSAY WILL BE SUBMITTED. | | | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Google's Algorithmic Cat and Mouse Game: The Case against Greater Transparency | | | jurisdictional armament with which to maintain, such a prolonged
confrontation. | |
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> | I was initially motivated to write this paper after the senate antitrust committee threatened to subpoena Eric Schmidt as a means of forcing his appearance before the committee. The Senate, likely aware of (1) the reluctance on the part of companies to open up their executives to interrogation when there are federal investigations under way and (2) the serious legal consequences confronting the government if there is any indication that the probes are not the result of good faith independent judgment, still went ahead with such an aggressive tactic, which sparked my interest. By “scrutiny,” I am merely referring to the existence of the various probes that you have referred to without making any judgment about the likelihood of an actual case. Perhaps I’ll just get the ball rolling with a neutral reference to the September hearing as to avoid any confusion. | | | Many have argued that Google tweaks its algorithm in ways that push down certain sites in search results that compete for eyeballs, allegedly because these sites have unoriginal content. Disgruntled site owners have cited Google giving Yelp the “TripAdvisor treatment” in support of their accusations. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, when questioned about Google Places, remarked:
"Google’s position is that we can take ourselves out of its search index if we don’t want them to use our reviews on Places…. But that is not an option for us, and other sites like us – such as TripAdvisor? – as we get a large volume of our traffic via Google search…We just don’t get any value out of our reviews appearing on Google places and haven’t been given an option other than to remove ourselves from search, how to improve this situation." | | | might differ), there is no appropriate mode of analysis that begins
by confusing them. | |
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> | I’ll delete everything from “Disgruntled…” onwards as I am only concerned with the former issue. | | | The "Everyone Wins" Artifice
Google’s competitors have bolstered their campaign against Google’s black box algorithms using the pretext of “consumer welfare” – which is defined almost exclusively in terms of consumers reaping the benefits of a fair marketplace that produces real innovation presumably through merit-based competition. | | | | |
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> | If search engines have become an undisputed gateway to the Internet, and are now arguably as essential a component of its infrastructure as the underlying network itself, does that not create a basis on which to argue for algorithmic transparency? In other words, if we accept that Google, the overwhelmingly dominant search engine, can assert full and undisclosed editorial control of what content you see and what you don’t, could you not deduce, as Foundem and other search neutralists have in the past, that this endangers the fundamental openness of the internet? I am simply trying to give Google’s critics a leg to stand on here even though I believe that public utility style regulation of a digital economy is pointless.
I agree with your comment about consumers. All users see is the supposedly objective final results, not the intervention by the gatekeeper. Unless the search manipulation is drastic (i.e. no relevant result appears), corrupted results are an “unknown unknown” and so no one cares. People will continue to see the search as a credence good, whose value is difficult to determine even after consumption.
Prosumers: I suppose one could argue that unless the search technology is bereft of individualized advertising, a federated search architecture, with its implications of democratizing the media towards participatory systems, would only spur the commodification of human creativity. The more users make use of advertisement-based free online platforms and the more time they spend online producing, and exchanging content, the higher the advertisement prices will rise and the higher the prosumer’s value will become as a commodity. The people who “google” data constitute a user commodity that is sold to advertisers; unlike with the radio and television, search users would be much more active, continually creating content, which is likewise commodified (exploited?). I do not see any other way to avert this problem without doing away with the advertisement space altogether a la Linux or Wikipedia, wherein the platform has use value and no exchange value. But then what would make federated search any different from a P2P? network?
| | | An Overview of Online Search
Google's sponsored links are produced for businesses interested in advertising and willing to pay Google when users click on their ads. Advertisements are generated by the keywords a user enters into Google's search engine. The amount that Google charges for sponsored links is calculated according to a keyword auction conducted through Google's AdWords? platform. These auctions are automated based on a set of parameters specified by each advertiser, and they occur instantaneously each time a keyword is entered into Google's search engine. An advertiser who places a higher bid for a keyword will receive better placement of its advertisements when a user enters that keyword as part of his search. Additionally, Google employs an innovative quality metric that adjusts the placement and cost to the advertiser of sponsored links based on the links' relevance to the search query and the quality of the underlying webpage.
The heart of the dominant theory of Sherman Act, Section 2 liability against Google relates to Google's use of quality scoring in influencing the outcome of its AdWords? auctions. The quality score employs advanced algorithmic technology to maximize the relevance of search results and thus the value of the search engine to users, the likelihood of revenue-producing impressions to advertisers, and revenue to Google. Allegations of anticompetitive conduct surrounding the quality score turn less on its existence--all major search engines use quality scores to improve the relevance of search results—and more on its arcane nature. The specific determinants of quality scores are kept hidden by design and Google has repeatedly justified this opacity with the obvious axioms: (a) No company wants to share its secret formulas with its competitors; (b) by making the ranking formulas too accessible, it would be easier for people to game the system. | | | The problem for Google is not transparency but rather making us feel that it is transparent. Google undoubtedly has some perverse incentives in the ranking process with their own content properties and that alone leaves us wanting for some transparency in the process, although Google owes us nothing. As end users, we are attuned to the belief that an open internet is a desirable internet. It is this openness however, that creates a spam economy and eventually, an unusable web. If anything, an opaque, ever changing algorithm allows Google to be one step ahead of the spammers, even if Google profits from some of the spam (i.e. sponsored links). I acknowledge that the logical outcome of this argument is dangerous, however: we essentially would have to rely on Google to make things more transparent, more open, and more independent (note: the user-controlled, transparent quality scoring system mentioned earlier would admittedly be appealing at this stage of the argument even though it would nibble away at Google’s ability to do as it sees fit with its essential intellectual property). | |
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> | Here’s what I think the roadmap of my paper should be as to address both search manipulation and the advertisement space:
1. Critics argue that Google determines search relevancy or where certain things show up in search results, accusing Google of operating a “black box” that lacks transparency or accountability. If this accusation is true, what’s the remedy?
2. One possible solution is to erect an independent search commission that would monitor search results in the interest of search neutrality.
3. Antitrust law, however, is about protecting consumers. This proposed solution fails to realize that transparent search would only be valuable to prosumers, not consumers. at this point I will have decided to no longer entertain the critics’ ideas and moved on to a few implications of federated search with respect to advertising
Given that this template would change my entire discussion, I wanted to submit my comments first.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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