Take it up with Colin Crawford’s 2003 article Cyberplace: Defining a Right to Internet Access Through Public Accommodation Law.

If people can see Internet Access as a right, so they can with Google access.

Jon

Engineer: I have written the next great internet platform and application. It will make us the dominant internet company for the next 20 years. It will change the way users interact with their computer and their information. It will bring about efficiencies in countless industries, increasing production across the globe.

Lawyer: Dominant internet company for the next 20 years? We should scrap the program.

Engineer: What? Why?

Lawyer: We can’t be seen as getting a monopoly. We can’t bring too much service to the consumer, or else too many of them will choose us. They might think they have a right to algorithms running the program.

Engineer: But it will be good for the world. Everyone wins.

Lawyer: It will be bad for Google. Delete your program.

It certainly sounds unusual to me to think that we have a “right” to expect a computer program to work the way we want it to work. If my hard drive crashes or my Internet access is out, I would would think it pretty strange to say that the computer malfunction “violated my rights.” (Right to what? Conferred by whom?)

Oren– indeed, this sounds strange, from a *legal* point of view. But rhetorically it’s fine. It’s not unusual to think that we have a “right” to expect that technology works without bias.

From the article: “A ‘right of reply’ would be difficult to put into practice…”

I’ve explained to Frank before that I have practical experience in helping someone overcome what I dubbed search engine obfuscation. My conclusion was that there were some simple steps Google could take to help individuals remedy these sorts of ranking issues (though not all).

also a very loose definition of monopoly as to consumers, since consumers can use any number of well known search engines, for free, at no cost to themselves.

I’m curious, do others feel this way? This statement seems tremendously strange to me.

(The difference is, of course, that street thugs have the intellectual honesty not to call themselves “eloquent.”)