Whether that’s good or not, nobody really knows.

There is no question that the current internet is plagued, among other things by surveillance, profiling and polarization at all levels. Two years ago, two UK researchers proposed, as one part of a larger solution, “a public sector challenge to the private interests that have colonised the search functions on which we all depend."

Concretely, that challenge should consist of developing a “public interest search engine”.

The authors DO mention that such an endeavour should start from meaningful answers to critical, very hard questions such as “what is considered to be in the “public interest”, who can define it, and which criteria and values should be used to then fairly rank information”.

That sentence alone could be enough to keep busy all philosophers, civic activists and policy makers of our generation busy for the rest of their working lives. Here, I just want to point out that there would be another issue to consider.

How many “publics” there are out there?

The issue I refer about is fragmentation.

Should there be ONE “public” search engine? It of course depends on who is “the public” in whose public interest this engine should be built. And don’t think “what’s the big deal, we already have more than one search engine anyway: Google, Yahoo, Bing…”

No, sorry. From the point of view of this post those engines are all the same. They are all commercial products by for-profit multinationals, all following exactly the same “economic” paradigm and rules, above and in spite of governments.

This would be completely different. These search engines would be much more tied to the politics, if not the ruling government, of whatever “public” promotes them.

So who is, or should be the “public” here? The UK? Some other country? The European Union? The UN?

How MANY of these engines should be developed? One per nation? One per continent? One per “cultural block”, assuming it’s possible to agree on such a definition at any meaningful scale?

And how what would happen then?

Could the residents of one country, block, whatever… access and use the public search engines of other countries or blocks? I am sure they could, at least the minority with both some spare money and some actual digital skills. But to see my point, let’s use “western countries” and the Ukraine invasion as practical example.

Today, almost all residents of those tens of countries get their news about the invasion online, by searching for them on Google, or being spoonfed by the same handful of corporate social platforms.

Now imagine the same people getting the same information from one “public search engine” per country. One in the USA, one in Italy, one in Hungary, one in Poland, one in Germany, one in…, OK, you get it now. A situation much more similar to what happened during WWII than, say, what we had during the 1991 Gulf War, or just ten years ago.

With the addition that it would be technically possible to set up and use some meta-engine that queries all the “public” ones, to give you so many points of views that it may be impossible to use them all anyway.

Would it be better or worse than today? I confess I don’t know yet. Ideas? Let me know!