Classroom Companion: Business

21.3
 Device and Search Neutrality
Two terms related to net neutrality are device neutrality and search neutrality.
Definition 21.2 Device Neutrality
Device neutrality means that any application should be able to run on any device and 
that it is possible to connect the device to the network of any ISP without differen-
tiation of price or quality.
The standardization of the technical infrastructure of ICT supports these require-
ments.
Definition 21.3 Search Neutrality
Search neutrality means that search engines shall return unbiased results to the user 
and be optimized to provide the most relevant results based solely on the search 
keywords provided by the user.
 
Chapter 21 · Net Neutrality

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Hence, commercial interests such as promotion of paid services or services owned 
by the company offering the search engine should not be a parameter in the algo-
rithm calculating the results of the search. Device and search neutrality have a 
less—if any—legal basis compared to net neutrality. However, there have been 
legal cases where companies—most notably Google—have been fined for breach-
ing search neutrality.
Google was accused of favoring services from their own ecosystem. For this 
practice, Google was fined €2.42 billion in 2017 by the European Commission 
(Vincent, 
2017
). More specifically, Google was fined for manipulating the search 
results in Google Search to favor results from Google Shopping—a Google service 
that allows users to search for products on e-commerce websites. Competing price 
comparison services were—according to the judgment—intentionally put far down 
on the list of Google Search results in such a way that consumers often ignored 
these results. This is a clear violation of search neutrality since Google used its 
monopoly dominance in the search market to favor its own products (Google has 
over 90% market share in the search market in Europe). Google has appealed the 
decision. Andrew Odlyzko predicts that device and search neutrality may become 
“hot topics” in the future representing “the next step” in regulating the Internet 
(Odlyzko, 
2009
). The legal case of EU vs. Google Shopping may mark the start of 
recognizing the importance of search neutrality.
To make the discussion of search neutrality less clear, it should be noted that 
search engines are standard devices in newspaper databases, product catalogs, 
address lists, and social media. For some of these, research neutrality is irrelevant 
but not for all of them. Both Amazon and Facebook are accused for strongly 
biased search (Shavins, 
2014
). Publishers may pay Amazon to get a higher rank in 
their bestselling lists and to include their books among search results. Facebook is 
accused to filter news to match user “preferences” based on previous behavior of 
the users.