For the past week or so, President Trump has turned his attention to search giant Google, claiming that the search engine is pushing positive news about him and his administration, further down in search results. And in turn, pushing negative news to the top of search results. The President added to this earlier this week showing a video that compares search results during President Obama’s State of the Union address and President Trump’s same speech from earlier this year. Now, Senator Orrin Hatch has asked the FTC to look into this and see if Google really is suppressing “positive news” about President Trump.
Google and its parent company, Alphabet, is no stranger to antitrust investigations. In fact, the European Union just slapped the biggest fine ever on Alphabet in an antitrust investigation. Google has pushed different sites ahead of others before, in its search results, which has led Google to having to be more transparent with stuff that is clearly an ad and those that aren’t. As well as adjusting the algorithms used to display these results. Generally, when you search for a specific term, you will get different results compared to someone searching for the same terms. This is because the results are tailored to sites that you visit and/or read. And that all comes from Google tracking you all across the internet. So this could be an instance of President Trump having personal search results turned on, but it likely isn’t.
During the past year, several of Google’s rivals and even equals, have said that the FTC and other regulators should be regulating tech companies a bit more. In fact, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said as much when he was testifying on Capitol Hill back in April. The reason for wanting more regulation is not to ban what these companies and cannot do, but it’s to make sure there is no foul play here and that users (and their data) are being treated fairly.