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>the proposition that certain social media sites actually should obey the "company town" precedent. This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation

>the proposition that certain social media sites actually should obey the "company town" precedent. This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation to use social media. >It's really never before happened in history where a private company has become the mediator and facilitator of discourse involving millions of people simultaneously. This depends on what you mean. On the one hand, up until ~30 years ago, discourse involving millions of people was impossible. So in one way you're correct. On the other hand, media companies of all kinds have historically had a huge level of control over what people see. When the only form of communication was the town crier, he controlled what you heard. When we added printed paper, the people with the press had outsized control over the media. And the barriers to entry were much higher then: I can spin up my own website in an hour. Your average person couldn't afford a printing press. >This almost infinitely scalable many-to-many communication property of modern social media makes it feel much more like a public space than newspapers, TV, and radio ever did. What public space offers infinitely scalable many-to-many communication? Public space is distance limited, these platforms aren't. Just because these platforms chose not to heavily regulate the content doesn't preclude their ability to ever do so in the future, nor does it make a comparison to a theoretical public space that never existed any more valid.

nilkn 8y ago
> What public space offers infinitely scalable many-to-many communication? Public space is distance limited, these platforms aren't. Just because these platforms chose not to heavily regulate the content doesn't preclude their ability to ever do so in the future, nor does it make a comparison to a theoretical public space that never existed any more valid. You're still extremely limited on Facebook and Twitter by natural space and time constraints. Just because these take a slightly different form and aren't based on physical distance between communicating parties doesn't mean that communication on the platform is just completely unfettered. So "infinitely scalable" does not mean that each person can actually consume all content produced by all other people. That's not possible in all current iterations of social media and presumably is fundamentally unachievable. Rather, it means the system can scale to an arbitrary number of producers and consumers, each of whom is still subjected to natural physical constraints, whether those be determined by physical location, screen space, the loudness of your voice, the speed at which you read, the speed at which you type, etc.
SiVal 8y ago
I believe that with network effects far more pervasive as things move online, monopoly/competition law needs to play a greater role. The basic idea is that any party that controls more than (TBD) percent of a significant market/distribution channel/medium/etc. (significance by total $, total # of users, etc., TBD) loses the right of a small, private party to unilaterally ban users. If you create a FaceBook competitor, identical in every way except dozens of other users instead of hundreds of millions, it would not be a realistic alternative. Likewise for Twitter, or real estate listing services, and a growing number of other things where it's not the tech so much as the other users. When network effects dominate, as is so common online, and users gradually lose the realistic ability to just switch to a different service with terms they like more, service providers must also lose the ability to impose any terms THEY like and to refuse service to users. What they can charge, who they can ban, etc., should become matters governed by regulators.
- nradov 8y ago
  There's no objective, consistent way to define a "significant market" for highly differentiated products. What market is Facebook in? Is it all web sites? All mobile apps? All media? All social media? All communication tools? Those categories are totally subjective and arbitrary.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    As someone that refuses to use Facebook / etc... I still see the free speech issue in this. Imagine it from this perspective; whom can a telephone company decide to deny service? If they have stepped beyond merely disagreeable speech (and I agree, it's often very disagreeable) where was that line crossed so that our court system might process their transgressions?
    - nradov 8y ago
      Telephony is a commodity service with a legally defined market. The rules for such services are irrelevant when deciding how to regulate non-commodity Internet services.
  - 8y ago
mediocrejoker 8y ago
> This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation to use social media. Were the town residents in Marsh v Alabama, required to inhabit the company town? I think the fact that they did is what made is a public space, regardless of whether they were required to.
- tedivm 8y ago
  I don't think that's quite right. The issue there is that the company town wanted to be an actual town- they were providing services, inviting people to move in (including people who didn't directly work for them), and generally saying "anyone who wants to can be here"- they were very explicitly trying to create "public spaces". Facebook is not the same thing- people aren't moving there and people don't live there. I know we want to pretend that digital and physical are similar, but this particular case that everyone is citing was very specifically about the company towns and precedent afterwords has been pretty clear.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

nilkn 8y ago

> What public space offers infinitely scalable many-to-many communication? Public space is distance limited, these platforms aren't. Just because these platforms chose not to heavily regulate the content doesn't preclude their ability to ever do so in the future, nor does it make a comparison to a theoretical public space that never existed any more valid. You're still extremely limited on Facebook and Twitter by natural space and time constraints. Just because these take a slightly different form and aren't based on physical distance between communicating parties doesn't mean that communication on the platform is just completely unfettered. So "infinitely scalable" does not mean that each person can actually consume all content produced by all other people. That's not possible in all current iterations of social media and presumably is fundamentally unachievable. Rather, it means the system can scale to an arbitrary number of producers and consumers, each of whom is still subjected to natural physical constraints, whether those be determined by physical location, screen space, the loudness of your voice, the speed at which you read, the speed at which you type, etc.

SiVal 8y ago

I believe that with network effects far more pervasive as things move online, monopoly/competition law needs to play a greater role. The basic idea is that any party that controls more than (TBD) percent of a significant market/distribution channel/medium/etc. (significance by total $, total # of users, etc., TBD) loses the right of a small, private party to unilaterally ban users. If you create a FaceBook competitor, identical in every way except dozens of other users instead of hundreds of millions, it would not be a realistic alternative. Likewise for Twitter, or real estate listing services, and a growing number of other things where it's not the tech so much as the other users. When network effects dominate, as is so common online, and users gradually lose the realistic ability to just switch to a different service with terms they like more, service providers must also lose the ability to impose any terms THEY like and to refuse service to users. What they can charge, who they can ban, etc., should become matters governed by regulators.

nradov 8y ago
There's no objective, consistent way to define a "significant market" for highly differentiated products. What market is Facebook in? Is it all web sites? All mobile apps? All media? All social media? All communication tools? Those categories are totally subjective and arbitrary.
- mjevans 8y ago
  As someone that refuses to use Facebook / etc... I still see the free speech issue in this. Imagine it from this perspective; whom can a telephone company decide to deny service? If they have stepped beyond merely disagreeable speech (and I agree, it's often very disagreeable) where was that line crossed so that our court system might process their transgressions?
  - nradov 8y ago
    Telephony is a commodity service with a legally defined market. The rules for such services are irrelevant when deciding how to regulate non-commodity Internet services.
- 8y ago

mediocrejoker 8y ago

> This only follows if you believe you're under an obligation to use social media. Were the town residents in Marsh v Alabama, required to inhabit the company town? I think the fact that they did is what made is a public space, regardless of whether they were required to.

tedivm 8y ago
I don't think that's quite right. The issue there is that the company town wanted to be an actual town- they were providing services, inviting people to move in (including people who didn't directly work for them), and generally saying "anyone who wants to can be here"- they were very explicitly trying to create "public spaces". Facebook is not the same thing- people aren't moving there and people don't live there. I know we want to pretend that digital and physical are similar, but this particular case that everyone is citing was very specifically about the company towns and precedent afterwords has been pretty clear.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]