4 ms·

We regulate lots of things already to stop private entities from roaming free and against the interest of the general population. So just playing the "but it's

We regulate lots of things already to stop private entities from roaming free and against the interest of the general population. So just playing the "but it's their walled garden" card does not cut it for me. For me the question is whether facebook has a significant influence on the population or not. I think they already do when it comes to News, more so than traditional news organizations even. On top of that, they claim to provide an open space for exchange and even discussion. Personally, I'd therefore like to see facebook being regulated to the point where they cannot simply refuse "service" to people of certain completely legal opinions discussing legal topics, same as they and other businesses should not be allowed to refuse service for certain classes of people.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Instead of meddling in the extant gardens, we should make it simple for people to move to one with better rules. The current state of copyright and tech access law makes that inordinately difficult. If we update these laws, it will be much simpler for competitors to challenge the lumbering incumbents like Facebook and Twitter, and then it won't matter so much what Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey want to allow or disallow. The free exchange format the internet offered is threatened by walled gardens becoming the home of 99% of online activity. Even something like Google struggles in light of this, since they aren't allowed to get in and make intelligent calculations about the popularity of online resources (which used to be roughly determinable by links mined out from the open internet). We are in trouble here.