I have made this case before, but I will make it again.
The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "unsee" those results.
So, searching the world's largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?
What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can't understand how AdWords is ethical.
The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "unsee" those results.
So, searching the world's largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?
What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can't understand how AdWords is ethical.