I was driving home last December when the radio announcer mentioned that our US Congress had tried to pass a bill that would legislate a fairness doctrine on the web by allowing an equal number of liberal results compared to conservative ones per topic for every first page of a search engine, irrespective of how popular those pages really are. So if you typed in George Bush, page one will, by law, be required to post just as many Bush-bashing sites as it does non-Bush-bashing sites. Of course, the law would be written in a way that the “balance” they are looking for would be subject to interpretation.

Is this a good idea? Sure, if your party is the one that is in power. But when your party is no longer the one making the decision on what web pages are deemed conservative vs liberal who knows how the balance will shake out. Is that what we want? The federal government deciding for us what we can see on our search engines. Is this not everything that the founding fathers feared? Does this not fly in the face of the first amendment that states “CONGRESS shall make no law…”

I never followed this story to know if it ever did become law or not. Considering the fact that I didn’t really hear much about it from the sundry of talk radio personalities I listen to indicates that it probably went nowhere, but the fact that it was even considered should alarm us a bit.