Dear Congress: It's Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either
Did watching elected representatives debate SOPA last week without understanding some fundamentals of the internet rattle your nerves? Welcome to my world of watching the same thing happen about Google and search.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after Clay Johnson argued at Information Diet that internet users owe Congress some literacy in how legislation works (Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works), Search Engine Land flips the arrow: watching the House debate SOPA showed elected representatives who lack fundamentals of how the internet — and specifically Google and search — actually work. The column speaks for an SEO industry whose entire business sits downstream of the mechanics being legislated.
It also extends a longer arc of scrutiny around Google itself: back in March 2011, NationalJournal's Google's Tarnished Chrome already had the company fighting perception problems, and this piece moves that unease into the legislative arena, where the rules governing search are now being drafted.
First-order effects
- Lawmakers weighing SOPA are writing enforcement rules aimed at search-linked piracy while, by the columnist's account, missing basics of how search works — meaning Google and the publishers who live off its rankings face legislation shaped without a working model of the mechanism being regulated.
Second-order effects
- The knowledge gap hands Google and the search-marketing community a concrete advocacy job: explaining indexing, ranking, and takedown mechanics to congressional staff becomes part of the anti-SOPA lobbying effort, not just position papers.
Third-order effects
- If hearings keep exposing technical illiteracy, the durable pattern is executives testifying before committees without the vocabulary to probe them — pushing platform companies toward education-first lobbying and feeding arguments for technical expertise inside Congress.
The trend: Internet-policy fights like SOPA are forcing a mutual-literacy reckoning in which the web industry must learn how Congress works and Congress must learn how search works.