[Political Junkie Too]

Though private companies, even the ones as large and influential as Google and Facebook, are not bound to protect free speech for the individual, “it is incredibly important that they be encouraged to do so,” she said.

It's no longer a free speech issue, it's a deceptive advertising issue. If a product's marketing is deceptive, it's false advertising and illegal.

If Google's contract is that, for the "price" of letting Google mine your data you get a service that lets you get superior search results, and then Google reneges on that by tilting those results in their favor to manipulate you, that's deceptive.

It's almost like old-time subliminal advertising where you think you are paying for a movie, but you don't know that frames of product were spliced into the film such that you were being manipulated into wanting the product.

In the Google case, you're being manipulated into thinking you're getting a true search result, when in fact you're being socially manipulated by those results.

It's subliminal, and it was made illegal in the past.

-PJ

[DesertRhino]

Google no longer has a superior search result. The quality has truly become abysmal in the last 2 years.
I search for specific things that I know are out there, and get results only tangentially related.

Search terms are completely ignored.

Google is really no longer useful as a search engine unless you want to find a business selling product X.

[Liz]

WIKI---Schmidt was CEO of Google until 2011, Ex/Chairman of Google 2011-2015 and Ex/Chairman of Alphabet Inc. 2015-2017.
In 2017, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 119th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of US$11.1 billion.