Google again has blocked search advertising that promotes political views that Google does not share.

On the morning of the FCC’s net neutrality vote last week, Bret Glass of ExtremeTech.com tried to advertise his white paper , that advocated a light regulatory touch, on Google Adwords only to find that Google blocked his ad as not meeting their “guidelines.” (See Mr. Glass’ full recounting of this non-neutral content blocking incident at the end of this post.) This is not the first time Google has blocked content that did not comport with Google’s political/policy agenda. For example, Google blocked anti-Moveon.org ads proposed by a U.S. Senator’s campaign.



The “relevance” of this evidence of net neutrality violations by Google, to the FCC’s just-proposed net neutrality regulations, is that the FCC’s clearly stated purposes are: to prevent companies with market power from infringing on free speech and to ensure that those with market power are transparent about their market practices that affect the free flow of information.

More than any other Internet player, the facts and evidence show ( DOJ ) that Google has market power.

Moreover, advertisers routinely complain that Google’s ad auction process is a non-transparent “black box” because it has a “quality score” that Google can alter to arbitrarily bury a website at the bottom of its ranking and ensure that it is not found. TradeComet filed an private antitrust suit alleging this.

Furthermore, Google admits to providing $270m in free adwords to Google-friendly organizations, but will not disclose who they are because that might show that Google is skirting lobbying, election, and campaign finance disclosure laws by laundering their Adwords market power through astroturf groups supporting Google’s public policy agenda. (In a Google keyword auction, if Google or one of its preferred surrogates is “bidding” on a particular keyword, no one can out bid “the house.”)

Much more troubling is Google’s public comments indicating their “black box” search engine and auction processes are not neutral, but are affected by Google’s political/policy biases.

In a Google’s blogpost in February, Google Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg candidly explained Google’s power over finding the world’s information: “We won’t (and shouldn’t) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on judging political “truth” in an FT interview “He forecast that, within five years, “truth predictor” software would “hold politicians to account”. Voters would be able to check the probability that apparently factual statements by politicians were actually correct, using programmes that automatically compared claims with historic data, he said.” “Politicians “don’t in general understand the implications” of the internet, Mr Schmidt argued. “One of my messages to them is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false?’ We [at Google] are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability.”

This Google role as arbiter of political truth is still at the forefront of Google CEO Schmidt’s agenda because only last week he told the Washington Post in a meeting reported by Mike Musgrove that: “I spend so much time in Washington now because of the work that I’ve been doing, I deal with all these people who make assertions without fact,” he said. Policy people “will hand me some report that they wrote or they’ll make some assertion, and I’ll say, ‘Well, is that true?’ — and they can’t prove it.” Perhaps that could change some day, he suggested. Technology could help.”



In conclusion, the evidence mounts that neither Google’s search engine nor its keyword auction system are neutral. It is also clear that Google has long aspired, and still aspires to help its users discern what Google believes is “the truth” in the political/policy arenas.

Given that Google, the Adminstration and the FCC are all on the same page that more transparency is good, why shouldn’t Google be more transparent in how its secret algorithms and black box processes determine what information is determined to be “drivel” that Google needs to send to “the back row of the arena” of politics and policy in Washington, as Google’s Mr. Rosenberg so eloquently and trenchantly said earlier this year to all Google employees.

Does Google believe Mr. Glass’ white paper is “drivel” because it disagrees with Google’s position?

Given that Googleopoly is the world’s dominant information gatekeeper, isn’t it relevant for the world to know what variables drive what political/policy information the world finds?

And more importantly what are the variables/biases that Google believes will enable Google’s “truth predictor software” to accurately predict the “truth?”

I guess the world would be a simpler place for Google, if people did not have to bother with judgement, critical thinking or learning, because Google could algorithmically provide for them what the “truth” is for any political or policy question.

********************************

From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>

Date: October 24, 2009 16:23:04 EDT

To: dave@farber.net, Ip ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>

Subject: Google “disapproves” net neutrality ad