alt Hacker NewsThe government having the power to curate access to information seems bad. You could try to separate it as an independent agency, but as the current US administration is showing, that’s not really a thing.
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The idea is that the government is biased towards hiding certain information and private companies are biased towards hiding a different set.
While unlikely, the ideal would be for the government to provide a foundational open search infrastructure that would allow people to build on it and expand it to fit their needs in a way that is hard to do when a private companies eschews competition and hides its techniques.
Perhaps it would be better for there to be a sanctioned crawler funded by the government, that then sells the unfiltered information to third parties like google. This would ensure IP rights are protected while ensuring open access to information.
And in a world where running a Google-like search engine is just one of the many jobs the US federal government has, why shouldn't how the government runs that search engine be a national-level political question decided by elections, just like the management of all the other things the US federal government does is? Regardless of how the government curated access to information, a huge chunk of the US electorate would be mad about how they were doing it, reflecting very real polarization among the population.