We should all be worried about Google’s power - EU fined Google $2.7 Billion last year for … bias in its search algorithms
We should all be worried about Google’s power
By Post Editorial Board August 28, 2018 | 8:11pm
Tuesday brought endless commentary and reporting on how
President Trump was being utterly ridiculous and conspiratorial to accuse
Google of bias in its search algorithms. Funny: Just over a year ago, in June
2017, the European Union fined the company $2.7 billion for … bias in its
search algorithms.
Yes, Trump’s off-the-cuff charge focused on political
bias, whereas the EU verdict (after a seven-year investigation) was about the
company “systematically favoring” its own Google Shopping feature. But all the
Trump-bashers who were suggesting Google would never, ever put its thumb on the
scale seem to have ignored at least one elephant in the room.
As we write, the top headlines on Google News include two
CNN stories: “Trump slams Google search as ‘rigged’ — but it’s not” and
“Debunking Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory on Google.” How is the
average web surfer to trust that Google isn’t weighting those stories?
The layman has plenty of reasons to worry about political
bias to which the company could be blind: Silicon Valley is a notorious
progressive place (except on issues that touch its own interests, anyway), and
the internal Google discussion over “dissident” engineer James Damore showed a
shocking intolerance for the merest questioning of certain left-liberal
pieties.
On the commercial front, Google’s power is obvious: Its
algorithms can literally make or break a company — perhaps a whole industry.
Google says, “We respectfully disagree with” the EU ruling that it “abused its
market dominance,” but that’s not exactly a rebuttal.
We’re no fans of heavy-handed government intervention,
but any free democratic society is going to frown on enormous unchecked power.
It certainly seems like some kind of independent oversight is called for here.
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