An Interesting Conundrum.

Mike Howes 25 Jun, 2006 at 2:10am ET Article published in Tech

A senator from South Carolina has proposed that search engines returning links based on advertising partners rather than content relevance, (pay-to-play deals) have severe penalties applied to them such as sanctions and jail time for the company executives.

The proposed amendment to the communications act targets search sites which “prioritize or give preferential or discriminatory treatment in the methodology used to determine Internet-search results based on an advertising or other commercial agreement with a third party”.

With violators facing fines of up to $5mil and company executives liable for a custodial sentence, who could object to such a proposal? Certainly not Google and Yahoo!. Having recently gone to Washington DC to argue against network discrimination, they can’t really be seen fighting for the right to discriminate on a selective basis.
However the worlds three most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN are principally advertising resellers. In effect the more pages bearing their advertisements they return, the more likely they are to prosper. It’s a commercial conflict of interest that none of them have yet to address, let alone resolve.

So the concern for web surfers today isn’t so much that corporate giants will pay their way into the top SERP spots, but that thousands of low value pages are returned which shouldn’t really be there at all.

Comments

25 Jun 2006 ~ 2:53am airbornflght That is BS really, I mean come on, the search engine is the business, said company pays google some money so that said companies name pops up on top.
25 Jun 2006 ~ 5:48am Enverex Google keeps them seperate to the actual search results anyway, thus the results with Google are always based on relevance (or rather these days just subsites made up with keyword spamming).

So, these people think they can make laws that really don't make much sense and that they shouldn't technically have any power over anyway (who are they to say what results a search engine returns?) rather than going after spamming groups, companies that camp domains illegally, other sites that try and trick people out of money/time/information. Yeah, go US, seems like this "controling the internet" thing works well in your hands.
25 Jun 2006 ~ 8:36am Garg I wish that senator would put his effort into net neutrality.
25 Jun 2006 ~ 10:43am airbornflght Yes, that would be a goo thing, and I totally agree with enervex, instead of going after hackers, phishers, pharmers, spammers, and people that deploy and write spyware, the us wants to control what search result pops up first. [carlos mancia voice]Duh da Duhhh[/voice]
26 Jun 2006 ~ 8:34am deepsea I have mixed feelings about the net neutrality issue. Things like macromedia flash advertising are eating bandwidth, VoiP providers are getting priority data flow, and now it isn't enough to have a DVD shipped, but you have to download it instead. Conspicuous data hogs should be paying their way.
26 Jun 2006 ~ 10:23am Garg

deepsea wrote:

I have mixed feelings about the net neutrality issue. Things like macromedia flash advertising are eating bandwidth, VoiP providers are getting priority data flow, and now it isn't enough to have a DVD shipped, but you have to download it instead. Conspicuous data hogs should be paying their way.

I'll admit that I should know more about net neutraility, but my understanding is that data hogs won't be the ones paying more, it'll be anyone that want to have their page load quickly. Google and other search engines will become the cash cows of these new fees imposed by the telecoms, and new startups won't be able to compete.
26 Jun 2006 ~ 12:02pm jradmin I think these senators need to put more time into fixing the problems with the country instead of BS snibbly crap like this. What they need to do is take this senator out and shoot him, then replace him with someone worth a damn.

I get so tired of seeing this kind of stupidity when we have much larger problems like stagnate economy, huge debt, 2 front war, illegal immigration, sub-par education, crappy healthcare system, the list can go on and on.

Lets fix the country before we start worring about stuff that was never a problem in the first place.
26 Jun 2006 ~ 1:09pm airbornflght

jradmin wrote:

I think these senators need to put more time into fixing the problems with the country instead of BS snibbly crap like this. What they need to do is take this senator out and shoot him, then replace him with someone worth a damn.

I get so tired of seeing this kind of stupidity when we have much larger problems like stagnate economy, huge debt, 2 front war, illegal immigration, sub-par education, crappy healthcare system, the list can go on and on.

Lets fix the country before we start worring about stuff that was never a problem in the first place.

Chia!
27 Jun 2006 ~ 7:28pm Camman I don't see the "interesting conundrum" Of course Google/Yahoo/MSN would be opposed to this, there's no reason not to be for them, especially since a lot of Google's revenue is directly from those advertiements