Law Commons^™

Internet Nondiscrimination Principles: Commercial Ethics For Carriers And Search Engines, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Unaccountable power at any layer of online life can stifle innovation elsewhere. Dominant search engines rightly worry that carriers will use their control of the physical layer of internet infrastructure to pick winners among content and application providers. Though they advocate net neutrality, they have been much less quick to recognize the threat to openness and fair play their own practices may pose.

Just as dominant search engines fear an unfairly tiered online world, they should be required to provide access to their archives and indices in a nondiscriminatory manner. If dominant search engines want carriers to disclose their traffic …