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Do Google/SaveTheInternet support discrimination against Google's competitors?

It will be very interesting to learn if Google and the SaveTheInternet crowd truly believe in opposing discrimination on the Internet or whether they employ "situational ethics" and only oppose alleged Internet discrimination by their political opponents.

  • In other words, should net neutrality only apply to network providers, and not application, service and content providers like the FCC's net neutrality principles says?

    • "consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers."

A recent Penn State study:  Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robot.txt, highlights that Google benefits from discrimination against smaller competitive search engines because websites block access to those search engines robots that crawl the web to find what users are searching for. 

  • The first part of this study's abstract explains the Internet discrimination that benefits Google: 
    • "Search engines largely rely on robots (i.e., crawlers or spiders) to collect information from the Web. Such crawling activities can be regulated from the server side by deploying the Robots Exclusion Protocol in a file called robots.txt. Ethical robots will follow the rules specified in robots.txt. Websites can explicitly specify an access preference for each robot by name. Such biases may lead to a “rich get richer” situation, in which a few popular search engines ultimately dominate the Web because they have preferred access to resources that are inaccessible to others." (Bold Added by me)

If Google, Save the Internet, and the coiner of Net Neutrality professsor Tim Wu are truly principled about net neutrality, why are they silent on this provocative and well documented study that shows that websites competitively discriminate in favor of Google -- the corporate piggy bank bank rolling of the net neutrality movement?

  • We're waiting...the silence is deafening..."don't be evil"...