FTC Tells Search Engines to Disclose Paid Links

linderdm writes "CNN has an article describing how the FTC wants search engines who receive payment for higher rated links, to disclose this to users. The concern is that users go to search engines looking for the best results for their search criteria, not the highest paid results for their search."

that's great!

[squarefish]

It's been a long time coming. Google [google.com] is the only engine currently doing a decent job of making clear which links are paid advertisements.

Does the FTC have jurisdiction?

[BitterOak]

Does the FTC really have the authority to do this? Are there First Amendment implications?

If I accept advertising on a personal website, am I required to disclose the fact?

Perhaps the reason the FTC is not taking legal action here is there is no legal basis for them to. Under which law would they sue?

I'm not a lawyer, but I am genuinely curious about the legalities here. Any lawyers or other experts care to respond?

Good for me? Sure. Fair? No.

[Schmelter]

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret I'm a Republican. You can flame me for this later. But being a Republican, I believe in the independence of the people from the government, and extend this independence for corporations as well. I believe in a fair, and open marketplace free of monopolies, which is exactly what the FTC was setup to enforce by enforcing the Sherman act of 1890. So, as a whole, I'm pro FTC.

This however, oversteps their bounds. What are they doing telling a non-government related business how to advertise, or what to put on their website? Don't they have a certain aspect of freedom of speech when it comes to composing and editing their websites as they see fit?

Now, of course I'm against any corporation defrauding the public as to what they do or how they operate, but is saying that a link was paid for really fraud? Yeah, it sucks that they can lie to you, but anyone can lie to you, it's your responsibility to be paying attention, not the government's to make sure that lies don't happen.

Now I'm not insane, I'm glad that I'll know that a particular link was a paid advertisement, but do we have to go to the lengths of legislating such a thing? Cut the red tape already...

Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a really poor decision on the part of the FTC - they shouldn't be "warning" companies, particularly if what they're doing is not in any way illegal. The market should decide. The rise of Google in what at the time was a saturated search market dominated by AltaVista is clear proof of that.

If a search engine displays poor results, people will stop using it. If the results are good, then they'll come back. It really doesn't matter how the results were created, through some complicated heuristic or through sponsorship.

Search engines have no obligation to be "editorial" - they're not newspapers, and they make no claim that their results are free from bias. It is beyond me why Ruskin would think otherwise.

Re:Does the FTC have jurisdiction?

[anthony_dipierro]

Does the FTC really have the authority to do this?

Yep, it's interstate commerce.

Are there First Amendment implications?

Yeah, but commercial speech has limited protection [abuse.net]under the First Amendment.

Under which law would they sue?

Not sure, but it seems that it could fall under fraud, or unfair trade practices, or something. The FTC probably has leeway to invent its own rules, as well.

Totalitarians begin small

[io333]

Search engines are for-profit corporations. They ought to be able to do what they please, so long as they are not doing direct harm to others. That is the essence of capitalism. If consumers of information demand unbiased searches, then they will gravitate to search engines that advertise such. Again, this is how capitalism works: the company that provides what the customer wants succeeds.

How dare the government dictate how information, from a search engine that is composed exactly of SPEECH and the PRESS ought to be formatted to benefit the "consumer." That is unprecedented, and unconstitutional.

If we let them get away with this, it's one fast ride down a greased up slippery slope to control of information on the net.

Re:There's a very simple solution

[silicon_synapse]

Just wait until M$ decides to get a search engine...

You mean kinda like this [msn.com]?

What about other types of "search"?

[callott]

One of the major online travel sites will quite happily skew "lowest fare" flight search results towards a certain airline as long as said airline is willing to pay them a modest monthly fee. (I'm not going to say which one.)

The lowest fares (in an absolute, mathematical sense) are still there, just buried 40 pages deep into the search results. 99.999999% of all users won't bother to navigate past the first page, but the "complete results" are technically available for you to browse through.

This is just one real-life example -- there are endless, and I mean endless, types of games you can play by sorting of results. As long as the company has something to gain by skewing search results a certain way, some of the companies will choose to do so. (Yet another argument against any one private entity monopolizing access to a certain type of information.)

Aloha,

-Cal

Re:What about other types of "search"?

[rcs1000]

Funny you should mention that.

I always thought that my search results with a certain on-line *travel* agent moved with *ocity* efficiency and would always give me the best price in its database.

Yet, when I restricted the search to my 'favourite airlines', I got different (ie better) results.

I thought it was a glitch. But you've made me think again...

Re:Stupid Idea

[nhavar]

Your sorta right. There's still a flaw though. Lets assume that I go to searchX for all my search needs. Soon I start to notice that the first link I click on never really deals with the issue that I'm searching for but is usually just pushing a product. After repeating this process a few times I begin to learn that if I go to the second page of the result set I actually get closer to the things I'm looking for. Soon I'm no longer even glancing at the first page I'm going directly to the second or third page. Websites and search engines would do well to learn from the failures of their material counterparts the magazines and broadcasting industries.
Most people pick up a magazine and flip directly to the article they're interested in bypassing 90% of the advertisements. This has caused magazines to start intermingle half a page of content with half page ads to get the user drawn to the ad. The saturation of ads in the market place has caused the consumer to become desensitized causing ads to become less effective until a "new medium" of ad space can be found and then saturated. We've already seen that the web has reached it's saturation point. Unfortunately noone is learning. The marketing companies and companies funding them continue to put so much revenue in to ad streams that they could fund most small countries. The drug companies put more money into the stream than Nike and Budweiser and yet the primary way that consumers come to know their product is still via word of mouth or person to person representation. If a stock had such low returns most people would dump it and the company would go bust. But the marketing just keeps going up and up.

Sales slump, more money into marketing, price goes up to cover sales loss and new marketing funding - sales slump. It's a circle usually only broken by upswings in the economy or by product advancement.

I think that the government should focus on making sure that the college educated marketing firms have legitimate diplomas. I'm sure there's a little guy in a back room churning those things out by the thousands.