Open, to What End? A Capability-Theoretic Perspective on Open Search
This addresses the issue of power imbalances in search technology for society, but it is incremental as it builds on existing critiques of openness in adjacent movements like open source and AI.
The paper tackles the problem of corporate control over search platforms by analyzing the open search movement through a capability-theoretic lens, arguing that openness should be defined by the capabilities it provides to users rather than what is made open.
The hegemony of control over our search platforms by a few large corporations raises justifiable concerns, particularly in light of emerging geopolitical tensions and growing instances of ideological imposition by authoritarian actors to manipulate public opinion. Recent movement for promote open search has emerged in response. This follows from past and ongoing push for openness to challenge corporate oligopolies (e.g., open source and open AI models) which have seen significant ongoing negotiations and renegotiations to establish standards around what constitutes being open. These tensions have hindered these movements from effectively challenging power, in turn allowing powerful corporations to neutralize or co-opt these movements to further entrench their dominance. We argue that the push for open search will inevitably encounter similar conflicts, and should foreground these tensions to safefguard against similar challenges as these adjacent movements. In particular, we argue that the concept of open should be understood not with respect to what is being made open but through a capability-theoretic lens, in terms of the capabilities it affords to the actors the system is being opened to.