Principles of information neutrality and counter measures against biased information

The Internet serves as ubiquitous, prompt source of information in our society. Due to the giant amount of information, the access to the information relies on information processing mechanisms as implemented in search engines, product recommendation systems, or online social networks. As a result of the engineered preprocessing mechanism, the retrieved information is biased and does not represent a neutral view on the available information, while end-users often are not aware of this bias. In this article, we de®ne the term aInformation Neutrality”, review current principles of information processing in the Internet and discuss in ̄uence factors hindering Information Neutrality as well as appropriate countermeasures. The main contribution of this article is to raise the awareness of Information Neutrality as an emerging key challenge in the Internet and to potentially consider Information Neutrality as a factor in the value-sensitive design of Internet-based services.