| While there is some merit to the motives behind regulating Google, the idea that it should be classified and treated as a public utility or common carrier simply doesn’t apply — that’s the takeaway from Gilad Edelman’s article for Wired. “Public utility comes from a contractual relationship between the government and that entity that is supposed to be the public utility,” said Barbara Cherry, a professor at the Indiana University Media School who studies common carriage and public utility law. There is no such relationship between Google and governing bodies. “A common carrier was someone who offered to carry something to any member of the public,” wrote Edelman, “Anyone who chose to do business that way was subject to certain legal duties, including nondiscrimination.” The thing is, Google doesn’t promise to behave neutrally because the foundations of its business are ranking search results and auctioning off ad inventory — two fundamentally discriminatory practices. But surely, no one wants Google to stop auctioning off ad space or ranking results. “If you mean nondiscriminatory in a much narrower sense, like does Google’s algorithm include whether the webpage has a conservative or a liberal tint, or is based on anything else—gender, race, what have you—then, yeah, Google might say that they’re nondiscriminatory in these narrower senses. But this doesn’t easily map into the question of common carriage,” said Scott Jordan, former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission and a current professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Irvine. The varying levels of familiarity with technology and law across stakeholders (the regulators, big tech and the general public) adds another layer of complexity that tends to stall momentum — and for good reason, since rushing these initiatives could establish poor precedence for the future. | 