New Search Engines – More Reasons for Net Neutrality?

Several new search engines will be debuting in the next few days – marking what some believe to be the first real challenge to Google’s grip over the market in years.  Each of these start-ups will offer an interesting new dynamic to online search.  From CNN:

Some sites, like Twine and hakia, will try to personalize searches, separating out results you would find interesting, based on your Web use. Others, like Searchme, offer iTunes-like interfaces that let users shuffle through photos and images instead of the standard list of hyperlinks. Kosmix bundles information by type — from Twitter, from Facebook, from blogs, from the government — to make it easier to consume.

Imagine these new companies actually obtained a significant amount of market share.  Imagine further that Google and Yahoo, threatened by this new competition, could pay Internet Service Providers for traffic priority.  The ISPs accomplish this by significantly slowing down the traffic to these alternative search engines.  Users, frustrated by a perceived slower service, return to Google and Yahoo, thereby restoring the online order.

Those of us who are satisfied with Google search may not find this problematic.  But the problem is that this cuts against the merit system of the marketplace.  We want new companies and new technologies to either fail or succeed based upon their value to society.  And we want Internet users to determine this value without undue interference from more powerful market incumbents.  While competition certainly drives innovation, unfair competition without a doubt suppresses it.

This hypothetical might be somewhat unrealistic since Google has been a powerful voice for network neutrality.  We probably don’t expect this kind of conduct from a company whose slogan is “Don’t do evil.”  However, the marketplace is very often amoral and Google’s policies may abruptly change if they ever found themselves under the gun.  But even if not, there are many other contexts in which we can imagine something like this taking place, including online video sharing (YouTube), social networking (Facebook), or VoIP (Skype).

Insofar as network neutrality prevents this from occurring, it sure seems like desirable public policy.