Search (Non-)Neutrality and Impact on Innovation

Pierre L'Ecuyer (1, 2) , Patrick Maillé (3, 4) , Nicolás Stier-Moses (5) , Bruno Tuffin (2)

1 DIRO - Département d'Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle [Montreal]
2 DIONYSOS - Dependability Interoperability and perfOrmance aNalYsiS Of networkS
3 RSM - Département Réseaux, Sécurité et Multimédia
4 OCIF - Objets communicants pour l'Internet du futur
5 Business School [Buenos Aires]

The search neutrality debate, as a parallel to the network neutrality debate, is raging worldwide, with search engines accused of biasing the ranking of their organic links to provide a competitive advantage to their own content. In a recent paper, we have designed a model and determined the optimal ranking policy for a search engine as a trade-off between short-term revenue (based on the potential immediate gain from high-ranked links) and long-term revenue (based on the satisfaction of users due to the relevance of the ranking). We here apply this model to investigate on an example whether non-neutrality impacts innovation. We illustrate that a revenue-oriented search engine may indeed deter innovation at the content level, hence the validity of the argument (without necessarily meaning that search engines should be regulated).

Mots clés: Categories and Subject Descriptors C23 [Computer Systems Organization]: Computer-Communication Networks—Network Operations General Terms Economics; Neutrality; Search Engines; Vertical Integration; Competition

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Pierre L'Ecuyer, Patrick Maillé, Nicolás Stier-Moses, Bruno Tuffin. Search (Non-)Neutrality and Impact on Innovation. NetEcon 2016 : The 11th Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems and Computation, Jun 2016, Juan-les-Pins, France. ⟨hal-01330741⟩