Rent and Bias
Search is a cost-intensive business operating in highly commercial environment. Yet, for the public, the services is free to use, financed indirectly through advertisement. Beneath this simple trade-off - free search results for the price of exposure to relatively limited advertisement - lie much more complex economic processes. On the one hand, there is the way in which the free labor of millions (who create the online content and place the links) is transformed into monetary value by the search engine providers (and other aggregators). On the other hand, there he economic bias of the companies themselves creeps into the search results. In this panel, we want to look at the economic models other than advertisement, and their social and political consequences.
