Absurd!
No sooner does one bit of nonsense die a well deserved death than others rush in to fan the flames of idiocy. A federal judge recently dismissed a lawsuit against Google from a company claiming that their business was hurt by their low Google PageRank. "The court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given Web site is false. Accordingly, the court concludes Google's PageRanks are entitled to full constitutional protection." Despite the decision, the whispering campaign favoring possible regulation of Google continues. A co-director for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society stated that the question of whether there should be regulation of web searches keeps getting asked again and again. The official goes on to suggest that regulation may be necessary should Google dispatch all of their competitors. Leaving aside that Google's competitors include such non-trivial companies as Microsoft, the fact remains that Google's popularity is due to its grassroots success among internet users. The reason that Google has become so popular is that it has fundamentally and substantially increased the utility of the entire internet. Regulation of Google, either directly or through litigation, would have a profound negative impact on the internet and, thus, on the national and global economy. Besides, Winston can't understand all the fuss about Google's PageRank technology, particularly since it returns Watchdog Watch as the first result from a search for Winston and Watchdog.