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Comment by MikeLui | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the relevance and importance of posting this to HN, but I also think there’s not much anyone can add to the innate absurdity of the idea and the president’s claims. Additionally, aren’t searches already somewhat regulated e.g. DMCA takedown notices?

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The claims are justification for the regulations they want to push through. Some countries have laws about what search results can and can't be returned. It's quite doable, and if you don't want it to happen, you probably shouldn't get complacent. Go talk to your representatives and consider getting active in an election campaign.

So it's absurd to suspect Google of doing something Facebook has already admitted to?

I think the more generic questions is how are we going to assess that an algorithm is fair or not.

Since we are going to have our lives more and more influenced by the results of algorithms, should we regulate them or not ? If yes, how ? How do you appeal to a decision made by a machine ?

I don't think there is any easy answer to these questions.

My easy answer is "No. Don't regulate. Stop considering it. It's a terrible idea. Please, no."

If you look at the simple but extreme case below (someone named Null) :

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

Maybe you want to be able to appeal to a machine made decision and that it should be reviewed by a human at some point ? But maybe not, at some point, changing your name is probably easier.

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