Who writes the rules?

This is a question it’s well worth considering the answers to before declaring to the media that you’re not breaking them…

Radisson SAS, a Scandinavian-owned hotel chain, has 700 doorway pages – pages designed only to boost its ratings in search engines like Google – Gunnar Bråthen, writer of e-guiden, has discovered. This, though clearly a form of cheating, is fair enough, except Google does not like it and works actively to root out companies who use this strategy – they encourage users to report this practice so that offending sites can be filtered out of their search results. Now, Radisson SAS may still wish to use doorway pages, but they might face a Google ban, and this is where the story becomes interesting. Martin Creydt, administrative director of Radisson SAS Norway has been contacted and has this to say on the subject:

We take the criticism seriously and will go through the matter again from a legal point of view. But our IT department in Denmark does not agree with Google on what ought to be allowed. (…) It would not be beneficial to be banned from Google, but Google cannot one-sidedly define the rules for internet use and search engines. There are a lot of other players we could cooperate with, but it’s clear that Google is important.

(Emphasis mine.) Oh, so you don’t agree with Google on what ought to be allowed? Well, tough luck. It might not have occurred to you, Mr Creydt, or to your IT department, for that matter, but Google happens to have every right to define their own rules – they actually own their own search engine, you know. I would suspect they couldn’t care less about what you, or even the legislators, consider to be fair rules for internet use and search engines. THEY DECIDE. And once they’ve decided, the users decide which search engine they prefer to use. That’s how it works. If that means you don’t want to play, well boo-hoo for you…

(Coverage in digi.no, pointed out to me by Martin.)